ok I have a good question, or at least I think so, I have a group of metaballs merged together and then piped into a Force SOP. I would then like to be able to Rotate, Scale, and Translate this as a single object to influence the skin of my character. However, when I do translate, rotate, and or scale the this metaball object the individual metaballs break apart into their sub parts and scale, rotate, and translate individually. Which is a big problem because then my bone looks nothing like a bone after this happens. So my question is how can I Rotate, Scale and Translate these metaballs together as one system and also seperately as individuals like it is doing now. Very many thanks to however can tell me how to do this. I really need to know how to do this and I can not figure it out from all the documentation out there. I also need the same setup for my muscle systems.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler :cry: :shock: :?

Metaballs interact with each other to generate the resultant surface. Scaling up is not a problem but I thinkd the problem is with scaling down. If you scale down enough you just have a string of beads instead of a nice flowing surface. There is no way around this. Just turn on the hulls of your metaballs to see the real problem.

The only real work-around that I see is to put enough metaballs in the muscle to hold the shape when the muscle is completely stretched out as this represents the worst case scenario. If you used a line segment to place the metaballs, just resample to a higher level of detail and knock down the weights of the metaballs appropriately. If you manually placed them, then you have to add them manually and adjust their weights manually.

How are you placing the metaballs?

Unfortinately I have been doing them manually. I am not familar with the other line process that you mentioned. How do you go about it if I may? Thanks For Your Help!

Cheers,
Nate Nesler