Basic Exercise

[Darkwing]

Just as a quick break from modeling the Daedalus, I decided to model a somewhat simpler model, any guesses?

 

[thefreshestever]

hookah?

[Darkwing]

nope...I don't even know what hookah is. To Google I go!

[Darkwing]

It occurs to me that this basic exercise is going to have it's difficult spot, namely his arms are made of Slinkies and I can't say I have the foggiest idea on how to make slinkies

[Meowx]

Why hello there, Tom!

 

edit: I would think his arms would be rather simple to create with a transparent spring texture on a regular ol' cylinder.

[Darkwing]

Yay, you win!

 

I've never made springs or anything before and I'd like for them to bounce around and stuff like they would. Though I dunno why, it's only a model, but you never know if for some reason it gets animated

[pixelplucker]

Trouble with a texture or deformed shape on a path is they would distort when stretched. Not quite sure how you would go about doing this in AM but if you could animate the path of an extrusion it would look better.

At least that is how I had done that in other programs.

[Darkwing]

well doesn't AM have some sort of spring simulator/physics/thingy or something?

[Darkwing]

And here's a new pic:

 

[pixelplucker]

How would the spring simulator work on an object without distorting it?

I never tried the spring simulator in AM yet.

 

If you could use the sweeper plug in an action and animate the path or create some sort of constraint system on just the path it would work great.

[robcat2075]

I'm watching an MST3K right now and looking at this tom servo character and thought of this thread. But where are the springs? Is it his elbows?

 

He doesn't seem to do much with his arms. It's not like they have to extend much.

 

A displacement texture solution like this might suffice.

 

http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com/2010/03/robot-elbow.html

[HomeSlice]

And you could put a dynamic constraint on his arms so they move around a little when he rotates.

[robcat2075]

It's not hard to rig a spring shape that deforms properly.

 

I used the duplicator wizard to extrude this spiral shape and used "Bone Falloff" to quickly fade the weighting of the CPs from one bone to the other.

 

If I left it at that the cross section of the springs would have flattened as the spring was squished.

 

So... I selected each spline ring individually and used "balance Selected" in the CP weight editor to make the CPs all identical in weight.

 

Now the spring maintains its volume as it is compressed.

 

springH264.mov

[Darkwing]

that will probably work. His arms are made from slinkies so that's where the spring comes into play, except of course it's very thin and tightly wound. When I'm done waiting for a render (which should be by tomorrow) I'll play with Servo some more

[Darkwing]

ok, got a new question. monkey barrel texture. can't seem to find a texture on the interwebs, so now i'm looking at procedurals. anybody wanna chime in with some advice here...rob, this is your alley isn't it?

[Darkwing]

also, I don't appear to have this duplicator wizard, where can I find it? I should probably ask the next question too which would be how do I use it to make my spring? <--figured that one out, still need the wizard though

 

nevermind, I overcame my own momentary stupidity

[Darkwing]

here he is now with some colour and a spring!

 

[robcat2075]

Is he originally a gumball machine?

[Darkwing]

his head and neck area are, his body is a monkey barrel, his arms are slinkies, his chest plate is like some rocket toys and stuff, not entirely sure about the bottom, though I believe he has a pool noodle at the very bottom plus some sort of space bus like toys going around his base. Fortunately the MST3K movie gives us some high quality close-ups of Tom so you can definitely tell it's one of those monkey barrels

[Darkwing]

So, if anybody has some better hands they wanna donate, I'm OK with that

 

[Darkwing]

almost done!!

 

[HomeSlice]

That looks great. Love the retro.

[MJL]

Most likely too late, life has been keeping me away from the forum. Anyway, You are welcome to try these hands.

Knuckles_Knuckles.mdl

[Darkwing]

thanks Myron, those'll do nicely once I squish them some

[Darkwing]

Well, that's about all I'm gonna do on Servo

 

TomMDL.zip