Stamping parts

[akota]

Hello,

I have an animation that calls for a tool to stamp parts out of a strip of metal. Is there an easy way to animate boolean operations when the tool goes through the strip?

[omeone]

Well, I'm no animation expert but this is an interesting one so I'll post my amateurish thoughts...

The most basic way (I can think of) would be to drill the shape in Modeler, and then it to seperate layers so it can be animated as a seperate object in Layout. If you set it up as child in Modeler to the main steel plate they will load in Layout in perfect position and should render seamless before any movements.

The interesting part though is how the punch will affect the steel - apart from the obvious parts being punched through.
The steel will have slight stresses and most noticeably will have bevelled edges which are very important to show if your going for something fairly realistic or convincing. Of course these bevels will have to be animated into the steel after the action... as they would give the whole game away before it.

Two possible solutions to get this (and likely tonnes more)...:
1. An animated bump map or
2. 2 morph targets

Also, I wouldn't try to animate all of the parts getting punched out of the same steel plate. I'd try to just do it for one part inside a bounding square of steel, then layout as many of these bounding squares as required end-to-end, to give the impression of one large steel plate - and then offset the timing of the punching action on the individual plates.

Make any sense? prolly not ;) that's why it says what it does over my avatar.
:)

[bloontz]

There's an boolean texture plugin that may work, I haven't tried it. It can be found at flay.com, it's called Shift BooleanTexture.

[John Fornasar]

This is a good example for reasons to make a story board...
visualize your end animation, then just do the work necessary to produce it.
With most industrial stamping machines, once the die moves down, you can't see the metal being stamped. That's one approach. If your tool is stamping a shape in the middle of a piece of metal, you'll need the second approach.

You'll need to model your machine... if the metal is coming off a roll, do a search for the old "filmstrip" tutorial. You'll probably just have to model a roll turning, and move a texture along the flat feeder strip to give the impression of movement into the machine.

If the stamp completely covers the metal, you can have your "finished" stamping in place but 100% dissolved, as the stamp pulls up, drop it to 0% dissolved.

If the tool is just stamping the center of the metal, you can do a morph... model the 3D stamped part, then zero out all the "Y" points as your morph. As the tool moves down, morph from the flat object to the stamped object.

You'll just have to do this once, then you can loop the animation as many times as you want in your editing program (or use LW if you don't have one... there's tuts out there for this too...

[akota]

Thanks to everyone for the replies, all great suggestions! The purpose of this animation is to show curious people what the die is actually doing that you couldn't normally see in production, ie: the punch stamping out the part without the die coming together. My biggest issue stemmed from wanting to show the raw end of the material being fed in to the machine and advancing as parts came out, but if I don't actually show the end I can loop it as suggested with the material just moving backward in the period of one frame for the next loop. I'll try to post a clip later.

[VWTornado]

I think the morphing idea is the easiest and most effective...you could just make an endomorph of the metal stamped and morph from the flat metal to the stamped one with an endomorph. simple, effective and easy to pull off. just make sure the flat metal has plenty of polygons to work with to make the stamped version.