necklace

[jer133]

i made a necklace consisting of low-poly polygon spheres and cylinders. The necklace is in a straight line, how do i place it on my character? I've tried the wire tool, its works wonderfully but it deforms the necklace geometry. any suggestion is much appreciated.

[stevesayer]

Do you want it to animate dynamically? Dangle and bounce and such?

--If so, and if you've got the processing power to spare, you could make them all rigid bodies and nail them to each other.

If you don't need it to animate, I'm afraid I think you're just going to have to position them by hand... I can't think of an easier way off the top of my head; maybe someone else will have something.

Oh, well, I suppose you could play around with geometry and normal constraints... don't know how straightforward that would be, though.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help. Good luck!

-Steve

[skullnation]

Under the animation menu goto deform>create nonlinear>bend. This deformer will allow you to shape the necklace into a ring without having to move each part individually.

Make sure that you combine all of the polys and that the necklace is selected before you add the bend. To adjust the properties of the deformer select it and then in the channel box click on bend1 and it will give you the controls, just adjust the curvature value either numerically or with the mmb.

These deformers are great for modeling and they will allow you to get some interesting shapes out of your geometry.

[jer133]

thank you for your advice.

XanderFX, the bend deformer works great but it deforms the actual geometry. to get a precise control i use the wire tool though. But the problem is the wire tool also deforms the geometry.

SteveSayer: I've tried using rigid body and dynamics but my computer runs very slowly and eventually crashed... I was wondering how to achieve the real time effect as in Playstation 2 games. My geometry is pretty low too.

[skullnation]

Why dont you try creating a joint chain, with a joint at each sphere, then parenting the sphere and cylinder at each joint, then select all the joints in the chaind and raotate them at the same time to curl up the necklace. This won't deform the geometry and will allow you to control the animation of the necklace by keyframing. Just make sure that all of your local rotation axes are pointing down the chain in the same direction.

[wasgm]

ok... i'm assuming that you created the necklace by creating a sphere and a cyllinder, and then duplicating them repeatedly to get the neclace.... in which case, you should have used the duplicate tool options to set translation and rotation values for each duplicate and duplicated all the copies at once..

this way the necklace would have been created already rotated, and you could have tweaked the settings till you get the desired shape... It might actually be faster to create the necklace again this way, rather than modifying the on you'v got

[perseus2]

This may not work on your model, but you could draw a curve on surface on your model's neck and shoulders, then use that as a motion path for a single "bead" of your necklace. Set the duration of the motion to be equal to the number of beads you ultimately want. Then you can use the "animated snapshot" tool to duplicate the beads along the path - finally offsetting the neclace from the neck by the thickness of the beads.

[jer133]

wasgm: Yes I actually played with the duplication tool with the rotation setting and it can create like a perfect circle? which is not what i wanted since i want to drape naturally over the character's shoulder in an irregular shape. thanks for your suggestion though

perseus2: I havent encountered this method before.. sounds interesting. I'm using a similar method at the moment... the wire tool. I shaped the curve into the shape i wanted and the geometry follows but the problem is the geometry will deform noticably if i move the curve too far... does this method deform the actual geometry? With the wire tool I can also animate the geometry easily by moving the vertices of the curve... I hope someone can learn from this

I will try your method out perseus2, if it doesn't work i think i will stick to using the wire tool or bones as someone suggested.

cheers

[jer133]

I just had a cool idea in mind...

If i make a set of joints and parenting the spheres... then making the joints an active rigid body (which is not possible) and add the gravity field. it would animate the joints and the spheres respectively. And it would be quicker since it doesn't have to calculate the geometry... but its not possible to make the joints a rigid body...

[rivard]

Have you tried the create chain mel script? It duplicates an object along a curve which is all you need.
Good luck.