Animating a drop being pressed through a syringe?

[low-key]

hi all,

how would you animate a fluid (not necessarily mayas-fluids) being pressed through a syringe ?!

i'm not after simulating the emptying of the syringes' body, for i will do this via mattes later on in post.

what i'm after is how to animate that drop of fluid, which will come through the needle and fall off onto the ground.

i did a few experiments with softbodies, for i wanted a poly sphere to exactly deform into the needle, while being flushed through, but it didn't work as i expected.

am i to keyframe the whole thing (maybe with help of deformers), or is there an easier way to do it ?! how about blobbies ?

btw, it's allowed to look a little exaggerated (toony), like maybe the needle deforms a little, while the drop passes through ... do i make sense ?!

hope somebody can help

[asciipig]

why not use a combination between lattices and blendshapes...
the blends could help you hit the exact droplet look you want .. and the lattice would deform the needle and the droplet squeezing through.

#en

[mantrid]

...if the surringe needle is metal...why would you bother animating the substance inside it? Why not just simply animate a blob of liquid comming out of the end...start a sphere scale at 0 and animate it growing and animate its shpae quickly and simply, and then even the drop. You could also do this simply with blobby particles instead for multiple drops, just emit from inside the surringe (from a tiny spere of something) and animate per particle scale so that they only grow in size when outside the needle...needle is a tube, so use t as a collision object. Do the liquid inside seperately. There are so many ways to do this effect, just try em and see.

[low-key]

well, i already achieved the look of a falling droplet by animating a sphere over a squash deformer. the only problem i still got, is the swelling on the tip of the cannulla. how can i make that sphere fit exacty into the needle ? using softbodies makes it fit but look unrealistically when leaving the opening. thanks, anyway ... =)

[mantrid]

why don't try just animating the shape manually...nothing wrong with not automating things. I.e., look at your sphere at eth frame where the swelling begins, and move the cv's around by hand...you should only need to move 2 or 3...you should be using simple geometry for this effect. Then, select the cv's you moved and hit the save key button (S). Don't forget to save a start state shape a few frames before hand. Then move forward maybe 10 frames and move the cv's to create a bigger buldge and save another key....then just playback. And if you have lots of drops comming out one by one and your really want to automate it, just send em all through a lattice. Scale the first two rows of lattice points to be inside the needle, then move the next row close to the end of the needle and scale it up a bit, then the next, etc etc. When the sphere pases through the lattice, it will modify to look like it is buldging as you want.

[low-key]

alright, thanks for your detailed answer ... i never used lattices before, since i'm pretty new to animation at all.
i'm a little afraid of doing cv based keyframing for it's such a tiresome way and i'm a pretty lazy guy ! ;o)

i will give it a try this weekend !