[zippa]

I have an interesting challenge that is costing me a great deal of time and still no luck.

I need to animate a material like paper traveling about it's course inside a copy machine where it would dispense from one roller, travel over other guide rollers and finally roll back up onto an end roller. Sort of like a roll of film winding from one side to the next, with the addition of an internal guide roller or 2.

i could only think of utilizing bones on a flat sheet, using the bones to control the paper's continuously changing shape as it unrolls off of the start roller, straightens out as it travels to the next roller and then rolls back up onto the end roller.

I am not very good with bones and rigging for that matter as everying I have needed to do so far in LW has all been simple linear motions, no character riggings needed, but I have to wonder if this is really the right approach anyway

any help would be appreciated.

thanks in advance
Paul

[Mark]

Possibly an easier method might be to model the whole paper path as a single object, then to fake the motion by utilising an animated, texture that moves over the surface and is transparent in the right places (or use an animated clip map)...

[zippa]

Thanks for the input, sounds like a good idea.

one problem i see however is that i need to show the roll of paper diminish on the start roller as it grows in diameter on the end roller. The material is very thick, it's for a medical inhaler which contains pockets of medicine, so i think it would be difficult to illustrate with a texture map because i need the rolls to change in size.

great tip though, and i'm sure it will help me in the future.

thanks again

Paul

[TowerFan]

You could use a morph for the roll of paper. Model a cylinder and create a morph to shrink/grow it radially along the long axis. Should work. Tip from Mark sound like the way to go as well.

[zippa]

Thank you for your message. it seems i have some things to try.

i should be able to get something to work.

i spent hours yesterday working with bones so that I can bend and straighten this roll where ever and when ever I needed to but wow, this turned out to be a lot of work and I am not even close to making it work yet.

I will pursue the morphing and texture mapping to see if I can pull it off.


thanks again.

Paul

[Mark]

One other thought - if you have the Taft (or is it the Polk?) collection from Worley, then you could always look at using the Hoser plugin to animate the paper (assuming you're going down the route of modelling and animating the paper as a proper object rather than using the texture route...

[zippa]

Thanks for the tip.
I just called Worley regarding Hoser which comes from the Taft collection and explained my project, they mentioned that Hoser would not be the fix, but somewhere out on the internet is a tutorial on how people have defined a motion path, attached a string of bones to it and somehow, through the use of morphing, pulled the object through the path... if I got it right!?

I can only just begin to understand this process, but will certainly need to see a demo of some sort to attempt to mimic this on my project


thanks
Paul

[Mark]

That's the thing I love about Worley. They really have a passion for 3D and aren't just in it for the money. It would have been so easy for them to simply sell you the Taft collection, and let you find out for yourself...

Try taking a look through Flay.com - they have an extensive tutorials database covering pretty much every tute that's ever been published.

I seem to recall there was an old tutorial on animating a Tank Tread that might have used bones to move the tread - that might help if you can't find the one the Worley guys were thinking of.

[TowerFan]

Zippa, attached is a really quick and REALLY dirty example of the morph technique. You can grow and shrink the opposite rolls at the same time while tracking where the paper attaches to the rolls.

Just load the object into Layout, go to the object's properties, deform tab, add Morph Mixer from the Add Displacement drop down, double click Morph Mixer, control the shape with the slider.

The texturing is a bit above my head but I'm sure there is a way to animate it along this shape.

Cheers to Worley! Great products, great service. Once you use FPrime you wonder how you ever lived without it.

[Warlock 279]

Wow...I would dread to take on this task, really. Seems something that would be endless headaches. I think you're on the right path with what they've been saying. The only thing I can add would be too look into "deformation along a path."

I've attached a few links to a tutorial about it, its the same tutorial but its only like 100 different sites, and seems to work better on some sites sometimes than on others. If none of the attached ones work, you can Google "deformation along a path + lightwave" and you should get the same results. I've never attampted what you're doing with spooling, and I definately salute you for giving it a whirl, I know it'd scare me off.

Let us know how it turns out, I'd be quite interested in seeing it, and if it works well I'd love to know how you did it. Its one of those things that seems simple, could look cool, but would be a real pain to actually do I think.


http://www.ksdd.com/articles/?p=94

http://digitalanimators.com/articles...fterinter=true

http://www.digitalproducer.com/artic...e.jsp?id=35883

[nemac4]

These plugs will make short work of the task.
The bone curve plug is what you need. Just look at the sample scene "bone8_cont3.lws" to see how to set it up.>

http://homepage2.nifty.com/nif-hp/

[zippa]

I want to thank everyone for all their help and input. A lot of greats ideas!!!

a few days have past since I got onto the forum as I locked my self away at a campground for 4 days to get this done. I am very excited to connect to all the links on the last 2 postings.

Okay, here's what I did to get the job done. Though I still want to improve it, it will do for now in order to meet the deadline.

There is a tutorial out there to animate a slug. This has to do with the talks of driving an object about a set of bones such that the object takes on the shape of the skeleton as it traverses from one end to the other.

the link: http://www.md-arts.com/tutorials.htm.
Scroll down to the slug tutorial. This worked great... on a simple version, meaning in 5 minutes I could construct a skeleton of approx 70 bones, which represents the path I need for my project, and I modeled an overly simple object, ( a capsule), and easily got this object to travel throughout the skeleton, adhering to and taking on the shape of the skeleton as it traveled through. Absolutely awesome and easy.

So I move on to apply this very same technique to my model (sort of a complex model, relative to the capsule) and 30 hrs later I could not get my object to conform to the bones neatly, without the object busting loose and going off course and/or distorting beyond recognition. Due to a shortage of time I ended up merely using the same skeleton and, frame by frame, adjusted the bones to represent the motion of the object traveling from one spool to the next. OUCH! 12 hours for one cycle and it isn't as clean and jerk-free as I wanted plus I really needed 4 cycles. But now that I am past this issue for now I will go back and try other options, work more with weight maps ect.

This technique has to work, I am very close.
When you follow the slug tutorial, be sure to check off the option 'use morph locations' (I believe that's correct, in the middle of a crunch so I can check it) on the bones property box in order for the object to snap to the shape of the bones.

Thanks again for all the inputs, you guys have all been a great help!

Paul

[zippa]

a quick and simple demo on deforming an object as it travels about a path defined by bones.

very simple in appearance but helped me to understand just how powerful this technique could be. As I mentioned earlier, this direction came from the 'slug' tutorial from my previous post.

Let me know if you have any questions

thanks


Paul

[Warlock 279]

Looks like it turned out alright for ya.

I've notice simetimes with tutorials that when go to apply them to your own project, tho they ought work ok, sometimes blow up, and you have to build it more or less from scratch. Its frustrating a lot of the time but usually you wind up with a better working knowledge of the techinique to go along with the headache. :headbang:

As long as it works in the end, and you've not beaten your PC to a pile of broken ciruit boards, its all good.

[zippa]

Yes, I agree, I certainly learned a lot, even if I couldn't utilize the tutorial entirely.

I was also relieved when I heard from the group that this wasn't an easy task and that it was going to take some work. At first I thought it was just me being slow.

It's great to have a forum like this to bounce around ideas, helps to keep us in check.

thanks
Paul