When using the magnet tool on the deform mesh in action, is there a “Smooth” function that will relax the warped vertices towards their default state?
In Z-brush/Blender you can hold Shift and painting on the mesh will smooth everything out, and it’s nice for when vertices start going wild.
Not that I know of. That would be a nice feature.
The way I do something similar is to Reset Shape on one of the adjacent keyframes. Then do a Set Key on the other adjacent keyframe. Delete the hero keyframe, and Set Key on the hero frame. Then delete the adjacent keyframes.
You can get more or less interpolation back to the default state by pushing the adjacent keyframes asymmetrically further away.
Not exactly elegant, but it works.
The other way to do it is apply the deform mesh to a UV. Use the UV to warp and then dial back the Effect in the Controls of the UV.
those are both awesome techniques! Thank you Ryland!
and “not exactly elegant, but it works” might as well be my motto.
This is exactly the type of scenario I requested in my Flame reverse user group. To have a proper fall off for vertices in extended bicubics and gmask tracer vertices. Grab a vertice and allow others around it to move under a gradient.
I’m not sure if this would help in your particular situation, but here is something that has worked for me in the past. I’ve done this a while back with extended bicubics, but I would think that it should work with Deform as well:
Let’s say you want to animate a flat image from non-distorted to extended bicubic reshaped surface, and back to non-distorted, etc.
Make an action with your surface, no ext. bicubic. Output the UV’s from that (generic/unaltered UVs).
duplicate the Action, and distort your surface. Output these UVs.
In a comp node, animate mixing between one to the other. Use this comp node output to feed UV’s into a third action, onto the same surface. Now you can go back and forth without having to set keyframes.
For localized UV blending (this might help you here), instead of mixing them in a comp node, do it in Action. Use a soft gmask to reveal in/animate different parts of the distortion to taste. The roll-off of the soft mask might help with smoothing things out, without having to fiddle with splines & keyframes, etc.
It’s been a while since I’ve done this, so hopefully these instructions work.
I have done this with deform nodes also. It works but with deform not sure if it’s 32bit output.
Also in bicubics it was possible to copy and paste animation key frames in shape channel to get the ease in ease out with a hermits spline. I haven’t done it in a while that’s why I say was possible. It could still be possible.
As for original question, does alt drag invert the magnet? Or shift alt?