Applying a Wave animation to a bunch of spheres without distorting them

[cosette]

Hello, Can you please help me on this one??

As you can see in the screenshot applying a wave to the spheres makes them distorted. is there any way to make the spheres follow the shape of the wave without getting them distorted?

or is there any alternative way of getting this effect?

thanks a lot i appreciate it! 

[joojaa]

The answer hasn't changed. Same thing use a softbody to get a particle object out of a grid (or directly set particles in a grid). Use a particle instancer to bind the spheres to your particle object and deform. Or use a particle expression. You can do as complicated moves a your brain can handle. Heres an example practice run from 2005 that's been lying around (bellow). Essentially there is a plane and a target object thats just a morph of said plane and a hermite spline in a expression based on shape normals and a timing offset per particle.

Anyway read the manual dont serach for a tutorial before you do. Its excplained there. Any motion cna be done qite quickly thisway.

[carledwards-edwards]

You may have noticed that the problem is that with a deformer you are transforming the vertices (the components) of the spheres and not their transform node (the "top level" or "object level" of each sphere. You want to move the sphere through space using it's own Transform.

[cankerberos]

hi! have you try with hair?

make a plane 

apply a hair system with the uvs same number of the plane subdivision

delete hair system, nucleus, everything except the follicles and plane and your objs

parent your objects to every follicle and zero transformation

apply a deformer (sine example) to the plane

and that´s it!!

I hope it was usefull!