One of the hardest tasks in AS is to animate the split in several parts of an objects. Some time ago I saw what metaballs can make in 3d softwares and it's pretty awesome. I took this image from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaballs
It would be fantastic to have metaballs in AS. Imagine you are animating smoke or water, with just some balls you could create a very convincing and fluid animation.
I have been thinking about this for awhile and now with the fantastic use of dll files (which I don't understand so much, anyway ) maybe it could be possible to apply in AS.
Metaballs have been around for over 20 years, they we're a big thing in the early 90s, but they have been replaced by particle systems.
You ask what we think, so here is what I think.
ASP has enough 3D gadgets as it is, and though I may be inclined to say that some of those are somewhat useful, I think that more 3D tools would only slow an already slow enough ASP, I also think that time should be spent fixing bugs and adding useful 2D tools to do 2D animation in ASP.
No matter what could be achieved with metaballs in ASP, it could be done better, faster and of much better quality in third party applications.
Because something looks cool, does not mean you need it, besides, the metaballs look was fun in the first terminator movie, let's move on to new technologies, shall we!
put what about 2D metaballs? (or at least metashapes?) maybe that's what selgin means? So that if we have two 2D circles come close to eachother they start to bond like this (maybe shapes can get their own 'shape influence' tool like the bone one which gives them an outer area of influence?)
It's probably quite complicated but probably possible?
It's another great idea, Selgin, especially if combined with particles or the Physics engine. I think the basic formulas are pretty simple, so it could probably just be done in pure Lua.
I've often thought of taking it even further and using the idea to develop a 2D muscle system, so you animate the bones and the muscles and the 2D skin moves with it. It would certainly solve joint deformation issues.
I don't know, I'd rather time was spent improving character animation tools than playing around with this kind of stuff, which is done much better in dedicated 3D software.
You could probably put a spreadsheet in Anime Studio too, but that doesn't mean it would be anything more than an intellectual exercise.
I like Rudiger's muscle idea, but that doesn't need Metaballs to do it, surely?
I have worked many times with water, fire, smoke and many fluids. I have developed some techniques to make them look natural, but I always front the same problem: in AS is you can't add points to shape without affecting all the before and after animation. The number of points is always the same, so you can't always deform a shape the way you want and can't divide a shape in two or more parts during the animation (which is what usually happens with fire and smoke). I know you can do it "by hand" in several ways, but the result is not always good and it needs much more work it should.
I have seem Synthsin's particles and it's not what I'm talking about. Since you can "simulate" a border with particles, they don't seem to be part of the same shape. It's very easy to distinguish where the individual particles are. Metaballs surround the shapes, gives the sensation of skin and works and behave differently depending of how close are the evolved shapes. I'm definitively not talking about particle tricks.
I'm not talking about animate terminator (even when with 2d metaballs it wouldn't be a nightmare as it's right now), but animate cool natural shapes with almost no effort.
PD: For whom which say let that for 3d software, I have been thinking about 2d and 3d software and I got a conclusion. 3d software have evolved and got very cool tricks because it lacks of the "do it frame by frame" limitation, they can do whatever they want and nobody is telling them it's heresy. In 2d software many discussions finish with that phrase. I like AS because it ignore that phrase, you have vectors, bones, masks, blend morph, particles and infinite tricks to get the "frame by frame" look in a fraction of the time. I just want to push that philosophy a little more, 3d softwares have many cool ideas which could be perfectly applied to 2d. Metaballs is one of them and, to me, it seems even more useful in 2d than in 3d. If you use it in a creative way you will obtain much more than a lavalamp (Rudiger idea is awesome, for example, and I never thought on that).
I'm asking it in scripting section, because many of the new features saw the light here before in the official software (I'm thinking on blend morph, for example). I don't agree with only think on improve or fix AS, there are many ideas and features which could make AS cooler than ever and I won't stop asking that because certain things/bugs must be solved.
Hi selgin!
In Synfig there are 2D metaballs. They are not fully developed and it was just a layer example made by the original developer. It can do some interesting things like this example:
(the bottom fluid line is just a shape point movement)
(fluid drop is not fully following gravity rules)
Metaballs are calculated in a raster world. You can control the number of metaballs, its positions, its radius and its relative weight. There are some examples of metaballs in Synfig: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuPJSUaEZwA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpEQkDvGOww
-G
Nice examples, Genete.
I imagine something like this. I have a layer with 3 shapes, then I create something like a new "metaball layer" which surround the 3 shapes.
If you hide the layer which contains the shapes, you get this:
Of course it would be cool to have control over the metaball color, width and effects.
(the example is a simulation made in AS, so it's not perfect)
) maybe it could be possible to apply in AS.
