SI-Community has a “resource dump” for scraps of stuff people want to share in an unfinished or flawed state for others to pick over. This “Greeble push deformer” I made a while back is IMHO a good candidate for such a bin, so I’m sharing it there.
BTW, if you don’t regularly visit SI-Community, why not? It, rray.de and the softimage mailing list are the heart of the softimage community. And vimeo:
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/56877450[/vimeo]
It works fine, so why am I putting it in a “public rubbish bin” rather than releasing it with fanfare? Well, I’m not particularly proud of it lol. Here are some reasons why this isn’t awesome:
- It’s a “push” style deformer, meaning it doesn’t create geometry it just deforms it. That kinda blows, it means you have to start with a very dense mesh. In fact, this is the main reason why I haven’t released the loads of terrain stuff I’ve got hanging around – I haven’t come up with a good way to make the geometry as I go and add detail only where it’s needed that isn’t too slow.
- This is just worley noise hooked to a push deform structure and a repeat node. I was sure a zillion people were going to do it, in fact I’m amazed I haven’t seen this compound done better from someone else. Surely we have some Star Wars fans somewhere messing with ice?
- I never bothered to add in a control to decrease the amplitude of the noise per generation. This would be easy enough to sort out but I never got around to it.
- The deformer respects normals, but the noise itself is spatial, in other words it doesn’t “flow” along the surface, which would be nice. Note the sphere shape in the video, instead of looking like the death star it reveals this spatial, circular character of the worley noise.
But it’s hardly doing any good sitting on my hard drive so here you go – consider it an example of how to iterate a push deformer. Try turbulence instead of worley noise and it will look a little terrain like. Change the worley noise and you can make some crater-like looks. So it sucks, but in a kinda fun way. Hope it’s of use to someone.
- AM
File: softimage 2013 scene, ~3 MB