SoftFX - waving hairs

[stib]

I'm doing an animation demonstrating what goes on inside the ear, and so I've got hundreds of little tiny hairs which I want to wave back and forth as the pressure waves come spiralling round the cochlea.

To simplify things I've got a cutaway model where you can see the hairs in just one section. They're each fixed at the base and free at the tip, and I've set up a weight map for this purpose.

So now I'm looking at the softFx tab and the lw[8]manual entry on softFx and none of it is making much sense to me. Does anyone know of any good softFX tutorials out there? I've looked but not found any.

TIA

-stib

[Rory_L]

Wouldn`t it be simpler to do it with texture displacement?

R

[stib]

The hairs are located on the surface of a membrane that forms a spiral not unlike the shape of a seashell. I don't know how I'd create a texture that would wrap around such a complex shape.

I got it to work, I drag a wind effector around the spiral, and set the soft fx on the hairs so that they keep wobbling for a long time using the operator tab and applying my weight map to the operator1 setting. I got there by trial and error.

Is it just me or is the UI for softFX a bit.. opaque? The manual is less than sensational too.

[hairy_llama]

Use CLOTH FX. make 2 point poly chains for the hairs. Blow wind onto them, should work perfectly if you get all your clothFX settings right.

[stib]

SoftFx worked really well for me; better than all of my past experience with clothFx, I must say. The good thing was I was able to drag the effector round the spiral once and it set up a nice wave. Because I'd set the operator wave cycle very high it kept going throughout the length of the animation. And the operator map meant that i could use the weight map on the hairs so that they were stiffer at the base and wavier at the tip.

I just wish some of this stuff were documented somewhere, because the controls for soft FX is probably the finest example of Newtek's crap UI skills.

[matd]

Seconded - can anyone recommend any goood books or online tutorials for softfx for a beginner. I've dabbled but was completely bewildered!

[munky]

Hi there,

you could check out the Dynamics section at Spinquad as it has some tuts and some example files.


regards

paul

[Crocodilian]

Saslite doesn't have any built in dynamics, but Sasquatch does. . .would be very good for this kind of thing

[stib]

I could also do it by buying a scanning electron microscope and hiring a sugeon to cut open my skull. But I'd rather not spend any more money / go through any more pain than I already have, thanks all the same.

BTW there's a preview of the animation here (http://www.fxscript.org/innaEarSoftFX.mov)

[Rory_L]

I could also do it by buying a scanning electron microscope and hiring a sugeon to cut open my skull. But I'd rather not spend any more money / go through any more pain than I already have, thanks all the same.
[/URL]
You have to suffer for your art!

Well the hairs are waving nicely, but it`s hard to see because the camera movement is so abrupt.

R

[stib]

True, suffering is good, that's why I choose to use products from NewTek™ </soap_powder_commercial_voice>

Yeah that's just an excerpt, there's a lot more, but I don't think the client would like me posting it on the 'net. It had to be pretty quick to match the VO.

[matd]

Thanks for posting the video - it looks really good! I think that maybe the problem isn't with the UI of softFX but the documentation. A clutch of step-by-step projects would be good.

Tell me - clothFX is basically Motion Designer in function and Hardfx is the third-party FXbreak plugin tarted up a bit, because there are tutorials for those online.

Still a little unclear as to how the Operator tab fits into the scheme of things. I'm approaching the softFX panel a bit like an analogue synthesizer; oscillator>LFO>filter>envelope - softFX seems to function in a similarly linear way?

[Thomas M.]

S**t! Even in my ear is this bloody vein texture. Hopefully not the crumple one, too. Otherwise I'm going to rendeman myself. :-)

[matd]

Another question; is it possible to run dynamics on an object then save the deformed object out. For example, if I were to model a table, then model a flat tablecloth can I run dynamics on it to calculate how it falls and folds around the table, then save out the modified tablecloth? In this example, the tablecloth wouldn't really need to interact with wind and dynamics, but it would be nice to get a realistic looking drape across the table, so it would be good to "freeze" it's final resting place as static polygons.

btw - what kind of wind generator and settings did you use? Did you sweep the wind around in the negative frames before the render started at 0 so it was already in motion?

[stib]

I just used a plain old direction wind effector, made it quite small - enough to fit inside the cochlea and I dragged it round the spiral, spinning it round to follow the path (follow motion path didn't work BTW, I had to keyframe it). I did start the waves going before the camera got to that position, this is a few seconds into the animation, so I didn't have to start before frame 0.

The Operator had a weight map applied so that the base of the hairs had a weight of 0 and the tip 100%. This was selected in the operator 1 section of the dynamics>operators tab. As for all the other settings, they were pretty much as default, except that the operator wave cycle was 99 or something high like that so that the wave wouldn't decay too fast.

I'm not sure why the hairs appear to stop at the end, it could be because I lengthened the animation without updating the .mdd file.

Hey of course you have the vein texture in your ear!. That vein texture has been scientifickally designed to be an exact representation of real life, just like all the thousands.. er dozens.. er, few other really useful procedural textures that LW has deigned to supply us with. (cf my many posts whingeing about LW's lame procedurals).

[Dodgy]

Use File>Save>SaveTransformed (Or save Endomorph if you just want to make it into a morph)...