ANIMATED DISTORTION

Distortion boxes are often used to model, but using them to stretch and squash a character during animation is even more powerful. A Distortion box is simply a special kind of model and can be selected and treated as such, (except for modeling itself).

BONES

Bones can be added to Distortion boxes to make them easier to animate. To add the bones, double-click the distortion box under the “Objects” folder in the Project Workspace, (it will automatically be in Bones mode). Adding bones and associating points with a bone is the same as for modeling.

POSES

Poses may be added to Distortion boxes. This can remove the tediousness out of animating a fairly dense distortion model, especially when the motion is used repetitively

INSTANCES

A single Distortion box can be used multiple times (instanced) on different parts of the model. This is particularly useful when work and time have already been invested into bones and poses for an existing Distortion box.

NESTING

Distortion boxes can also be nested. A Distortion box affects all geometry from its target bone on down, including the target's children bones. If one of these child bones is controlled by another Distortion box, then the outer Distortion box will control the points of the child Distortion box also.

When using nested Distortion boxes, it is easiest to directly animate the inner Distortion boxes first before they have been warped by an outer Distortion box, (because once they have been warped by an outer Distortion box, the mouse can no longer follow along with your movements). However, this is counter-intuitive to the animation process which focuses on big changes before fine-tuning. An alternative is to use Pose sliders (whose motion was created on the inner distortion Boxes before they had outer distortion applied).

SAMPLE PROJECT

To demonstrate some uses for animated distortion boxes, open the Distortion Demonstration Project(right click link & select "Save As", and click the Play button on the Frame toolbar to see the animation. The egg-like head was animated with one simple Distortion box of 2x2x2 resolution. The box has the "head bone" set as its target. To animate a Distortion box: click the Distortion box to make it the active model, then click the Muscle mode button and animate the points of the distortion Box over time.

The eyes were animated with two more Distortion boxes. The Distortion box called "Inner Distort for Both Eyes" contains a bone used for animating. There are two poses on the "Inner Distort..." model: one for bulging, and one for bending the eyes. The same Distortion box was used on both eyes. The motion on these inner Distortion boxes used Pose sliders. For example, the blinking motion was done to the model before any distortions were added. It is a simple pose done with muscle motion on the geometry of the eyelids. The blink pose works even when the eyes are distorted, because the distortion on the eyes distorts the lids too.

Back