[007] Blender tutorial - Fill object with curve [Animation nodes]

hello everybody and welcome to another blender tutorial this time I will show you how to create this effect of filling some geometry with twist curve and of course procedurally or computed updated each frame so it can deform or update with deformed mesh or animated mesh and effect that we will get is something like this and the final product is actually just a curve so you can use it as any other curve in blender so we can run some objects along the path or do whatever you want with it okay let's stop this this should be actually a pretty short tutorial so jump right into the blender and first of all this tutorial will work only with add-on for blender that's called animation nodes and because I am not exactly aiming this tutorial for beginners is definitely for at least inter mediate users I will not go through details how to install it where to find it if you go to Google and just Google animation nodes here it is you can activate it and you will get the necessary stuff that we will use in this tutorial okay we want to fill some mesh geometry with curve so of of course we need some mesh geometry for example sphere it's pretty much the simplest shape for this to happen and we will work with inside of the sphere so I would like to see inside but don't have necessarily wireframe view here so I will go to round cube display and set this to wire so I can see actually inside what's happening there and I could be on the first frame it doesn't really matter here okay for our curve in the inside we need some points where we will generate the curve and those points should somehow automatically fill the space so we don't have to care about the shape of this object and the best way I found is just create particle systems so new particle system we don't want it to move but maybe it will create some pretty nice effect but for this I want to have pretty much all the control over the points so scroll down to the physics and set it to no physics no motion there will be just particles and I see only one here and that's because the particles are generated all in one frame they are in several frames here in from one and to two hundred frames so just sets this to zero and now we have all the particles here and also if we want to use it with animation we need to make sure that the lifetime of these particles is longer than the length of the animation so some arbitrary huge value why not okay where we want to create them that depends where we want the curve to appear it could fill inside of this shape or it can be on the surface like it's now emitted from faces so the curve will be actually on the only on the surface we want to further volume so set this volume and the curve will actually shoot some random geometry outside of this because it will go from point to point and if the points are really random so it will go from this today's and back and forward it will generate not exactly this shape but pretty much anything will look like a sphere after a while so just uncheck this random value it doesn't really change the position of the points but the way they are generated is actually changed you will see it after the curve will appear okay and that's pretty much all for this you maybe don't need so much points let's see some really few so you will see the effect and now let's go to the animation notes so I will change this to note editor Here I am already in animation nodes I create new node tree and make sure the animation nodes aren't execute always it's heavy for the system so not always but every time something change frame or some value some property whatever okay first we need the position of these particles so shift a let's find out particles get particles no this won't be helpful what's another we have here particles from object yes this is much better we will just find this object is round cube it's sure our sphere and here we have all particles inside the sphere that means really all of them so if I have more particle systems here it will get all of them so some information of these particles let's run here particles locations and now we want to use these locations to generate some new curve okay is curved love not f curve but spline and here we have create from points okay now we created spline from points we don't see anything we have to use this spline to actually create object from this spine so again spline and where it is object output here we have we need to have some object where we can put our spline we don't have fun so we will hit this plus sign so we had new curve target which is for now empty so there is nothing here and we will just connect this spline to splines it can get more than 1 so it will pick it will create a list from just one spline ok we have two spline here I don't see anything yes because we have to activate is okay spline is generated it's generated inside sphere that's good everything works as expected we want to see it so we will have to make to create some thickness for the spline so pebble apt or for example right here point zero three but it's not exactly smooth it's actually straight lines from point to point but animation nodes have really nice note for Bezier curves here it is smooth Bezier place it right here and now this smoothness is there okay we can control is point three something is probably the best value for days and as you can see it's not exactly a lot of it's not filled it's really see-through okay I can activate it always for now and play with the particle systems one thing I can do is make it through back to faces okay we will have it only faces with more particles like 10 times more we start to get some filling like it's knitted or making make from rope but we actually wants them to be inside so back to the volume and make much more of em like three thousand okay it starts to work also I don't want to place any subdivision surface or anything on this so right here I will also increase pebble resolution to two or three so it's nice and smooth get rid of the round cube and we have the sphere filled with curve and of course it should work with the animation so let's just see if it actually works so delete all of this and I import it FBX of this dancing man so I will which to some other layer if I play the animation here you can see he is dancing it's a motion capture from mixer mode calm the in the description will be linked to this side I didn't edit it at all I will just use this mesh and try to from this animation out recreate the fling with curve okay first of all fire frame so I can see inside create particle systems we will need a lot of them start and and zero volume not random velocity doesn't really matter but should be zero otherwise the particles can be created outside of the surface and physics no okay where arc particles don't render emitter why don't I see them what's wrong oh I found it and the lifetime of course should be some arbitrary huge value because we are already already on frame 53 and the lifetime was only 50 okay go back to the first pose and if you look just to the particles and play the animation you should see that they are there they are keeping their position relative to the mesh if I place on the render you can see the particles moving weights to mesh it could be nice effect too but we want our curve to be there stopped animation object is alpha survey surface for now there are particles and we create new target ok where is the target ow why is everything broken oh of course auto execution it could be below test point zero one for example and you can see that some connections are actually outside of the mesh they are coming from random parts of the from the mesh from the particle to particle you can control it somehow with a seed just play with it until you get something that you are happy with you will probably don't get the exact result you want so just go with something that looks interesting for this detailed mesh this smoothness could be actually lower or maybe not it looked better before and if the outer execution is set to always the curve will regenerate in every frame of course the frame changing here is not enough because the animation nodes will be behind one frame always so if the rest of the animation is on the frame five the animation nodes will regenerate the frame for so you will have to check this always button and it will regenerate as you can expect and well ah it works as expected and as I promised of course this is just a curve so if I turn off the animation nodes I can do with the curve whatever I want it doesn't have to have depth and I can put some object on the curve so modifier curve use it as any curve pie would do and move it it's really weird but it works as expected and it could be nice effect to okay this should be enough it's already longer than I expected I hope you find it kind of useful if you have any questions leave them and leave them in the comments of course and it's all from me so till the next time bye

Channel: Wiresoul Studio

Views: 30,428

Keywords: blender, tutorial, animation, nodes, node, editor, fill, curve, objects, geometry, wool, dance, fiber, mesh, effect

Id: K3CwKkiJZN0

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2017