Spring Question

[Wigand]

I need an animated spring for a watch. (balance wheel)
The center is rotating and holds its diameter.
The outside is fixed.

Someone an idea to do it right?

Possibilities:
Soft selection,
morphing,
alpha mapping

Soft selection seems to be not animateable.
Morphing is complicated and not exact enough.
Alpha mapping and changing the texture while animation is running... is complicated too and hard to create.

[Prodigy]

can you share that object? i like to do some tests..

[Wigand]

Thanks Prodigy
Here a spring...

[robert]

If you know the physics behind it you can write a script that will help you.

Mind you it will be excessively complex, but it will always work no matter what and make it easier to scale.

[froo]

Dele made some spring scripts some time ago; I applied them to the flag script to get some nice 'wind blown' effects.
I'll find them and post them here. They may be useful.

[RAYMAN]

The texture is bad because I dont have time to do that but what i did was use the softselection in silo ... I first placed the widget in the center where the turning point is then adjusted the softselection so that the last polys on the spiral were not choosen and made incremental turns of 30 deg and saved them and rendered them out in vue.... thats what froo is working on right now a sequence exporter ... i did it manually here and you could have also rendered it in Ts.....
texturing needs work on though but i need to spend time on our comunity project instead...
there are some applications like Modo that are very cool for this kind of thing as they let you adjust the falloff in the toolpipeline......
Carrara can also apply deformers so does C4d ....
You could also save the extreme states and use them as a morphtargets..
HTH !
Peter

[Prodigy]

i miss this post.. i found a good way to duplicate the behavior

Tell me if you still need it..

[RAYMAN]

For some reason the Truespace workspace side softselection doesnt take all vertices that you select and you get distorted
results.... but if you happen to be able to download the 4 weeks trial of Modo it has the best tool to do that its called derform vortex.
I show you both Ts and Modo as a screengrab.with camstudio..

[Prodigy]

OK,

This is my result, for this i used Morphs and also i used Délé's Spring Animator script to make the bounce..

There is a Master timer for realtime, and if you unlink the timer i added a keyframe for offline rendering.

Im gonna create a tutorial to show how i made this..

[Prodigy]

And here the Video tutorial