Elden Posted October 18, 2013 Report Share Posted October 18, 2013 Hi I'm a beginner in this so pardon me if I'm missing the obvious. I need to make a parametric pine cone that I can change on the fly. I thought growfx would be the perfect choice but I can't seem to make the cone petals conform to the shape I need as symbolized by the green shape. If there had been a graph editor under "distributors" "angle bend" and "offset", this would have been very uncomplicated. Unfortunately there are no graph editors for these values, only some mysterious "affect parameters" that seem very unpredictable and difficult to master. So please can anybody tell me if there's a way to do this? Pine cones are, after all, members of the vegetable kingdom and should be covered by Growfx ;-) Thomas pine cone test.max Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ptrain03 Posted October 18, 2013 Report Share Posted October 18, 2013 Hi Elden, I took a shot at it. Your right, it is kind of difficult. I had to make a blade manually. Then I made a two path model (the distributor and the geometry ) Then I used instance mesh with "deform along path" checked. I used the "path position" to affect angle bend, and length. and used graph controllers for density and turn axis. There is probably an easier way to do it. there is a post somewhere on the forum about spiraling distribution, i'm just not sure where it is at the moment. note: the textures are from the internet. I altered them substantially, but I didn't own them initially so you probably make your own if you want to use them fr commercial work. hope it helps . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ptrain03 Posted October 18, 2013 Report Share Posted October 18, 2013 Hi Elden, I took a shot at it. Your right, it is kind of difficult. I had to make a blade manually. Then I made a two path model (the distributor and the geometry ) Then I used instance mesh with "deform along path" checked. I used the "path position" to affect angle bend, and length. and used graph controllers for density and turn axis. There is probably an easier way to do it. There is a post somewhere on the forum about spiraling distribution, i'm just not sure where it is at the moment. pine cone.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elden Posted October 18, 2013 Author Report Share Posted October 18, 2013 Thanks a lot for that! In the meantime I went ahead with another solution by starting off with that primitive test I did above, then converted it to a mesh that I deformed. Not an elegant solution but it actually worked for the type of cone i needed now. I had a look at your file. Seems you need some programming skills almost. Would not have been able to figure this one out by myself. Two graph editors for offset and angle bend under "distribution" would have made it a lot easier. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ptrain03 Posted October 19, 2013 Report Share Posted October 19, 2013 No problem, it provides an excuse to try new things. I didn't think of deformers, good idea I wish I had programming skills:) Once you use the software for a while its starts to make sense, I'm about 3 years in and even though it's a fairly small plugin I still learn new things. I updated the model a bit, fun challenge. here is the model pine cone.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mithcd Posted October 25, 2013 Report Share Posted October 25, 2013 Looks like a lot of work but it's always a good thing to learn new things. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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