How to Use the SURFACE DEFORM Modifier in Blender!

what's up guys justin here with the cgessentials.com so in today's video we're going to talk about how to use the surface deform modifier to transfer transformations of objects from one object to another inside a blender let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so what this is going to do is it's going to allow us to take a simple shape like this plane and deform it while transferring that deformation to a more complex object so instead of having to figure out how to deform this monkey what we can do instead is we can actually transform that deformation to this object right here and so let's take a look at the way this works so first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to tab into this plane i'm going to make sure that i've subdivided it so you can just right click and click on subdivide in order to do that i've already done that so i'm going to do a control z right here you want to make sure there's enough geometry in here that a blender can kind of take that information and transfer to your object the more geometry the objects have the better the deformation is going to work and so what you're going to do is you're going to start by taking this object right here and you want to add the surface deform modifier to it and so what it wants to do is it wants to wants us to find a target object to transfer the deformation from so we're going to click right here and then what this is going to do is this is going to give us the option to bind our object once we've done that what that's going to do is that's going to tie this object to the shape right here well now if i tab in here and i select this and i move it notice how part of my object over here is going to get moved around as well but you might notice a little bit of a problem and the problem is we do it this way right like this your deformation doesn't look very good even though it's a very simple deformation on the right hand side of the page and so the reason for that is because when we bind this object and i'm going to go in here and click on unbind we want to make sure that this object is really close to our plane that we're using for this deformation so in this case right i'm going to put it like right in the center of this object right here now when we bind it it's going to transfer those movements a little bit better so now if i make a change right so if i make an adjustment right here notice how the adjustment is happening on the object as well and a good way to look at this is to use proportional editing so if we select the top right here and then move it notice how that movement is being transferred to my object and what you can do is you can once you've bound this object you can move it back off of the surface just make sure that it's really close when you originally bind it to this object but now notice if i move this over that deformation is being transferred to my object right here so this gives us a bunch of really interesting options for what we can do with this and so one way that people use this is they use this to deform their objects as if they were cloth without having to apply cloth to the actual object in here so notice how i've applied cloth to this object right here so that if i hit play that cloth is going to kind of like hang down i haven't done a whole bunch of changes to this but um that cloth is going to kind of hang down what i've done is i've taken this text and i've converted it to a mesh and then when i converted it to a mesh i can add a surface deform modifier and so i can link this to my plane right here and then i can bind it and so then that transformation of your cloth is going to get applied to your text inside your scene as well so you could use it to do something like this but i could also use this to do something a little bit more interesting like let's say that i had a plane like this and i applied cloth to it so we're just going to add the cloth modifier go into our physics real quick and what we want to do is we want to wait paint our corners so we can set them to be fixed and then we want to add a pin group to it but now that's going to simulate as a piece of cloth then you can add the surface deform modifier to your object right here so i'm going to go ahead and add a surface to form modifier we'll link it to our plane and we'll bind it and then we'll click play we'll notice how what happens is these rings are actually deformed along with our object right here so we could use this to simulate a cloth and then we could hide the cloth like this so this allows us to do a simple deformation of an object like our plane and then apply that to something like our rings really quickly so i will link to some other modifier tutorials on this page leave a comment down below let me know if you're using this for anything i just love having that conversation with you guys as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 38,043

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender surface deform, surface deform modifier, blender surface deform modifier, surface deform blender

Id: 3tYqf2bmOUI

Length: 4min 41sec (281 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2022