Hi Andi, Had a bit of a wrangle with this recently.
Definitely build the final thing first & work backwards. Reference is good http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqF-rv2Yo3s A bit of roto never hurt anyone. For good control with a flying ribbon (as they can twist unhelpfully when animating spline shapes) try: 1. Create the ribbon curve profile on the XZ plane, i.e. thin rectangle and then extrude up in Y. 2. Freeze all transforms, which will give you an animateable "Centre" property on the object. 3. Apply a lattice to help with twists along the ribbon. Animate the shape using cluster centers. 4. Apply Deform along Curve for the deformy bit. 6. Make sure the first point on the spline is at the end of the tied ribbon so that you always animate towards zero. With this setup you can animate the the Y translation in the Centre operator which means the ribbon can fly into/through the Lattice, or any others you setup. The lattice also stays where it is instead of getting deformed along the curve which makes it easy to animate it's shape. You can set up a final shape and fly the ribbon in/and out of it quite easily. To animate the spline shapes try using Cluster Centres. Make sure your spline is has bezier handles & assign a Cluster centre to each point & it's handles. The Cluster centre itself is automatically placed at the CoG of the points which doesn't help much, so create another null, move it to the control point's position (aligned with the handles perhaps) and then parent the Cluster Centre Null to it. It means you can move, scale and rotate the null to control the points. Power Extrude is a great tool but I found it a bit slow for whizzing things around. Hope it makes sense, drop me a line if not.... Adam. ________________________________ From: Andi Farhall <andi.farh...@primefocusworld.com> To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Sent: Thursday, 11 October 2012, 17:03 Subject: RE: tying a bow on a christmas present I'm going for a standard bow that you would tie your shoe laces with. Seeing as i've plenty of experience with that one.... From:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Alan Fregtman Sent: 11 October 2012 16:24 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: tying a bow on a christmas present Got a reference image as to what kind of bow you're after? There are many kinds of bows. Some simpler than others. On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 11:21 AM, Andi Farhall <andi.farh...@primefocusworld.com> wrote: Me and my big mouth.... It seemed so simple before actually attempting it, tying a ribbon around a bottle into a bow. No slight of hand allowed, must be viewed in all it's glory. I'm looking for any direction whatsoever that may give me a fighting chance, bearing in mind i'm not a character animator and my early attempts of shape animation a spline look like twitchy spaghetti. any pointers gratefully recieved, cheers, Andi. Andi Farhall | Senior 3D Animator T: +44 (0)20 7565 1000 | M: +44 (0)7976 263 989 A: 37 Dean Street, London, W1D 4PT, UK http://spylon.tumblr.com/
