Hello Jelly

chucky · Post by **chucky** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 5:02 am

EUREKA! have it!
It just occurred to me, and I am happy...momentarily
I have not tried this yet but, here goes .....
I was using bones 'cos I thought the dynamics where going to help, but they mess up a bit anyway.
The other thing is that I have to manual save bone animation and load again into various bone array copies, so why not ditch the bones and go for just point animations here?
Then I can use meshinstance to propagate the animation to all the multiple tentacle layers .

No... no that won't do..... I need the tentacles to flow and follow with the main direction of the lead object .... in this case the jelly blubber.

Dang....

......................time for another
............................................................

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 5:26 am

Hey Chuck, why don't you use bones to move your instanced layer/s and then use its instances to do the layer rotation? That way you could have the bone motion, but the instances don't need to be in a bone layer (or under bone influence anyway).

If I have a chance, I'll try it out on you example.

Nice gif, BTW!

chucky · Post by **chucky** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 5:34 am

Thanks Synth, I think I'll have to read that about five more times before I understand, getting to grips with all these layers are like counting second, third and fourth cousins.

OK, now, no jokes about that , this ain't Tasmania, let's keep the humour clean

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 6:11 am

Basically just do all of your animation to the originals except for those 3D layer rotations. Then make meshinstance duplicates of all the vector layers, make these camera facing, and do the 3D rotations with these in the group layers like you're using.

(I tried to avoid saying things like 'instanced instances'.

)

chucky · Post by **chucky** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 6:28 am

HI Synth, yup that's exactly what I thought in the Eureka post.. but here's the glitch... I'll update with a gif that explain what I won't be able to do.
watch this space,....which leads me to another idea..... stand by.

chucky · Post by **chucky** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 7:13 am

Ok so notice the tenties are trying to compensate for the turns .
There is only actually one bone moving in a loop at the moment, plus the parent bone travelling in its trajectory all the rest are governed by physics.
If this works I can do swarms of the damn things all with many more tenties, I wanted to use springy stretchy bones (using Vern's script) but that was beyond me.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 10:21 am

And nobody mentions the absolutely perfect glass of water. Did you notice chucky's absolutely perfect glass of water? You should have a look. It's an absolutely perfect glass of water.

DK · Post by DK » Fri Dec 05, 2008 10:28 am

I saw it...it's brilliant..and obviously located on a boat somewhere

hehe..

DK

chucky · Post by **chucky** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 11:35 am

Ok so still using bones, getting closer, this method could work REALLY well if I could see bones that aren't in the same bone group. Is there any way of seeing these bones with a script or is that purely programming?

I have made some big compromises to get this, but I do have bones in XYZ (kinda' sorta')
And oh I forgot to bind the blubber, doh! I'll re-render and edit this post without that crazy tentie wiggle in the background.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 1:05 pm

I maybe like the unconnected circles even better.

Anyway, this is a great example of what AS is able to create, stylewise.

funksmaname · Post by **funksmaname** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 1:09 pm

shame about the choppy gifs

p.s. your 'absolutely perfect glass of water' truly is an 'absolutely perfect glass of water' of the highest calibre (on a boatt)... nice job.

chucky · Post by **chucky** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 1:09 pm

Thanks Slowtiger , maybe I don't need the stringy part of the tentacles, the circles kinda ' give the illusion.BTW, if I turn 3D camera off the circles get squished, they seem to be quite round now, not sure why though, maybe 'cos I don't have any 2 bones linked and rotating , even though it's still all done with bones and physics, no point animation.
And thanks for the water critique.... it's my visual pun on ASPRO.

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Tue Dec 09, 2008 3:32 am

You may have already solved this to your satisfaction, but I figured I'd go ahead and add another option. This utilizes the odd fact that line widths are camera-facing when the layer is rotated (so kind of automatically 3D). I think it's the scale compensation that is altering some of the lines in this example.

http://www.mediafire.com/?0jbnzrnjd2f

Edit::Oops, I forgot to include meshinstance with this, and my connection is acting up too much right now. Sorry about that.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Tue Dec 09, 2008 5:22 am

chucky wrote:this method could work REALLY well if I could see bones that aren't in the same bone group. Is there any way of seeing these bones with a script or is that purely programming?

This could be done... you don't want to actually edit the bones right? Just see them?

I have this crazy crazy script mod I use on all of my AS tools that allows me to create named bone groups that I can colorize, hide and show etc.

click for larger image

However at the moment this only displays the bones of the selected bone layer. I am using a really complicated "drawme" function to "outline" and color the shapes of bones. This is totally separate from AS bone drawing via the application. I am doing the "drawing" using only the script interface.

There is no reason this couldn't be used to draw bones from other bone layers... it just never occurred to me to try that. When I get a chance I will take a look at my scripts and see how to do it. To make it "easier" to use I would create a modified version that would just globally make bones visible on other layers so no "extra" file needs to be saved as my current bone group script does.

-vern

chucky · Post by **chucky** » Tue Dec 09, 2008 7:00 am

Wicked guys thanks. I'm out of town right now will check this all out properly as soon as I can.