Cube to Sphere animation?

[nouvelleorleans]

What would be the best way to melt a cube into a sphere (or at least a blob of some kind)? I've played with polys, nurbs, sub-ds, and have struck out shamefully. The objects I need to melt are large-featured, uniformly blocky chunks very much like 3D tetris pieces. Any help would be enormously appreciated as I am starting to sweat the deadline for all the r&d I've focused on this.

[aken]

have you tried blend shape deformer?

in this case...you take your cube...duplicate it how ever many times you want...
then with the duplicates...model how you want the cube to melt....

then you use the blendshape deformer found in the animation section of maya go to DEFORM> CREATE BLENDSHAPE open the option box...and choose IN BETWEEN....this will make the cube melt into the steps that you modelled...you'll have okay control over the way it melts too...

anyways...good luck...sounds cool

-peace-
aken009

[nouvelleorleans]

Yeah, the problem I was having with the blend shapes approach was that the topology of a cube and a sphere are so drasticly different that I was unable to create anything smooth, spherical, blobby, or anything other than bulged from a cube (six planes). Seems like the only shot here would be to try and deform a sphere into a cube, but I don't know any good method that could then be applied to the tetris-like shapes that I am using. Thanks for the reply.

[aken]

hey man...thought I'd give it a whirl..
here's my result...if you like it...I can explain how I did it...

both objects came from the same sphere

http://www.geocities.com/aken009/temp/sphere2cube.jpg

hmmm..for some reason you'll have to copy paste the link into the address bar...it won't let you just click on the link...I think it's a geocities thing...
-peace-
aken009

[nouvelleorleans]

I would be curious to know what method you were using - I need to have my cubes pretty crisp, but you're difinitely on to something. Looks like your method would work like a charm back in the Alias Poweranimator days when you could weight your CVs (god I miss that).

I've had some luck today creating a nurbs sphere with 16x16 and selecting various devisions of the CVs and snapping them into the appropriate sides and corners to force a cube and then going with keyshaping from there. Not looking forward to applying that method to the more complex tetris-type objects in the scene, but could if I can't come up with anything better. Thanks for the response and example.

[aken]

yeah man...sounds like you are on the right track ...but if you want crisp edges...I would use poly's...you have a little more control with those...
I just snapped the CV's to the grid...probably the same as you....but yeah...poly's would work...anyways...good luck...

-peace-
aken009

[ragecgi]

Have you tried this?

Super Ellipse and Super Ellipsoid v0.6:: By Adam Martinez
- [ Works on: 4.x, NT ]

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/plugins/?section=modeling#776

Basicly, you create a Cube object, then just key it to make it change into a sphere.

I've had to do the "cube to sphere" trick in the past, and this is what helped me do it:)

[thematt]

hey you can downloaded the fitmorph script in the mel section on modeling...it will probably help you get what you want.
It's really a great script thanks to Eric miller

cheers