How to model a growing root?
by Jakub Michalski
on
Sep 15, 2006 at 1:41:48 pm
I am trying to create a "growing root" animation. Just one pipe, no branching necessary. To do that I was planning to use a circle extruded along the path (partial extrude) and animate one of the ends.
It all works fine except for one "fine detail" - I cannot manage to get the tube to be thinner on the "growing" end.
I remember long ago seeing a tutorial explaining how to make a profile for an extruded surface that would allow one to control the changing thickness of the tube - but I am no longer sure if the tutorial was even dealing with maya.
Could anyone suggest a way to solve this newbie problem?
Re: How to model a growing root? by Steve Sayer on Sep 15, 2006 at 4:51:30 pm
First, make sure you have History on.
When you open the 'Extrude' options panel, make sure to choose 'partial' curve range, and set the 'Scale' attribute to zero. This combination of options should give you the results you need.
By animating the 'End Position' attribute of the path curve, you can control how far along the path the root tip grows. This tip will be a sharp point because of the extrude 'Scale' being zero.
Note that, by animating the scale of the circle at the same time, you can make the whole root gain thickness over its growth process.
Re: How to model a growing root? by Jakub Michalski on Sep 16, 2006 at 10:28:23 am
That is EXACTLY what I was doing, yet the extruded tube would distort in unpredictable ways whenever I play with scale, rotation and such.
Finally I looked at the setup and had a moment of enlightmet - "Well, Theeeere is your problem": My curve's pivot was in the middle of the curve and the extrude followed that point for deformations. As soon as I moved the pivot to the 1st CV and then moved the curve so that it's pivot overlaps with extruded shapes' pivot - voila! all works fine.
Thanks for the tip with scaling the profile - it really does help :)
