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I am trying to create a ribbon using an extended bicubic. I’ve keyframed some vertices to get the movement I want, but I now need to adjust the speed of the movement so it whips like a flag. With so many vertices I’m having a difficult time adjusting the tangents of each keyframe so they ‘ease in’ or ‘ease out’.
Is there any way to have an extended bicubic only divide on the x or y, not both so I don’t have as many vertices?
Or does anyone know a better way to approach this?I would REALLY welcome any ideas.
Thank youmanipulation of a heavy bicubic can be a real pain; i feel your suffering
would displacement work? you couldn’t apply displacement to the already-bicubiced ribbon your created (it’d probably look weird), but if you took a clip and cropped in from top and bottom to create the thickness ribbon you wanted then passed a clip of black/white blurry shapes thru it as displacment with heavy softening it might work for what you want (especially if you turned on shading & shine)
hi,
you could also try attaching a deform node, which can be subdivided as you wanted, also the result is a bit smoother, as you dont control the vertices directly, but only “reference vertices”
good luck
roberthi,
actually there are no tangents, as the geometries are no bezier splines, rather something like b-splines working with external spline points.
maybe its becoming more clear if you look in top view …
another interesting aspect of the deform is, that you can scale it independently from the surface & animate it over the image.
so you could build something like a static grid & translate it over the image instead of animating the vertices of the grid.
re the manual, i could find something in the the action > 3D Geometry section, its not very detailled though.ciao
robertha! it’s so funny that rob posted about the deform node…i was just working on a shot and i stumbled across a similar implementation using a deform node that i thought might help.
you’ve probably already solved your situation but i thought i’d post this in case it’ll help:
i took a cylinder and textured it with a diagonal white stripe (i was going for a spinning vortex graphic). anyway, in the process of experimenting i attached a deform node and reduced the cell count to 1,1,1. when i selected all of the control points on the deform node on one end of the cylinder and rotated them around Y i got a very cool “flapping ribbon” effect. totally accidental but kind of on topic for what you were looking for.
i had on shading and you have to put a light in front of and behind your geometry to correctly illuminate the front & back faces, but the overall effect was pretty cool.
hope this helps
k
i usually create the shape i want for the ribbon with the beziers and then animate it using the axis’s Z scale (ie. going from positive to negative values). this way you have more control over the movement. i’d parent a few bicubics together as well to make them more intricate.
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