Modeling slime drops - any tricks / hints on how to speed up workflow ?
polycounter lvl 18
well, a friend of mine asked me to do some slime drops hanging from the inner ceiling of a friendly free willy animal.
now my knowledge of cool tricks is extremely limited so i usually always model things straight away.
but i remembered some tutorial that made it so easy to make some realistic ropes with some of the physics system in 3dsmax. so i thought, hey maybe there's some nifty trick that calculates superrealistic slime drops within max
Could that be the case ?
Or maybe other fancy tricks/hints that could speed up the development process ?
Here's some nickelodeon slime refs - which is basically what we're aiming for:
since i'd need quite some variations (small, middle, big size, 2-3 pairs connected, and so on...) a nifty trick to speed up the workflow would be very much appreciated
Maybe even some supercool minitutorial that you folks do ever so often
*puppylook*
oh and it's for tf2 and may sure get jiggleboned
now my knowledge of cool tricks is extremely limited so i usually always model things straight away.
but i remembered some tutorial that made it so easy to make some realistic ropes with some of the physics system in 3dsmax. so i thought, hey maybe there's some nifty trick that calculates superrealistic slime drops within max
Could that be the case ?
Or maybe other fancy tricks/hints that could speed up the development process ?
Here's some nickelodeon slime refs - which is basically what we're aiming for:
since i'd need quite some variations (small, middle, big size, 2-3 pairs connected, and so on...) a nifty trick to speed up the workflow would be very much appreciated
Maybe even some supercool minitutorial that you folks do ever so often
*puppylook*
oh and it's for tf2 and may sure get jiggleboned
Replies
also there is Glu3D for max
that might be worth a look. To be honest though whats the problem with modeling the drips. seems you could take longer searching for an easy way than it would take to model a few hundred of these drips. a simple box model with mesh smooth would do the job.
Simulations in max or blender won't translate to real time. Even baked out as vertex animation it gets really costly on system resources and most engines choose not to do it let alone simulate it.
Is it going to drip? Or is it going to just hang and possibly dangle or jiggle a little?
Is it going to be attached to something that moves, like a character? Or just placed in the world?
Jiggle bones typically inherit motion from a parent object, like this:
[ame]
Meaning the parent object needs to be moving.
If its going to be placed on something that doesn't move like the ceiling of a level, then there are some physics inside of Source that will help it jiggle when hit but it won't ooze and drip.
You could also animate the jiggle. The best you could probably do is give it a low health rating and spawn splatter when it gets hit.
I forget if source lets you animate scale on bones but if you could squash/stretch bones there are a few more tricks you could do to animate the slime dripping. Or possibly use free floating bones...
If you're just looking to make a gooey static mesh that doesn't animate then I would fire up zbrush, mudbox, maybe even 3dcoat and just sculpt something then polycrunch/proOptimize it down to a usable level.
There are quite a few things people would need to know before they could say "yes you should do it this way".
i don't wanna simulate the slime dripping process. i wish the portal2 stuff was released already
it's hopefully going to "hang and dangle and jiggle" a bit. even though i haven't looked a single time on the whole jigglebone mechanism, i thought, when i animate it just a tiny bit it might jiggle along quite nicely. if that fails, we could go with the source physics solution you suggested.
btw, that blender video looks terrific