Director concept was naturally brought to life Exhilo logo. There is a lot of possibilities to do that: soft bodies, cloths or even hand-keyframed bones, but our choice was particles, especially pflow box#2.
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- Initially, we model logo (from splines!).
- Initially, we model logo (from splines!).
- Then, every strand was divided into smaller pieces. This was used as driving objects for particles.
- And here is the main trick: small proxy pieces was ported to pflow and used as glued objects. With all PhysX stuff, this allows us to drive every strand separate or even entire strands cluster.
- Tip: for smooth strands cluster movement, PhysX subframe factor must be set pretty high (in this example – 50)
- Finally, to reduce particles intercollision errors and to fix some free space between divided parts, the entire particle system was “skinned” on to hi-poly strands. This can be done by Particle Skinner or with 3dsmax standard Skin Wrap (if particles are baked to animated geometry).
An interesting thing that even splines can be used as skinned objects to particles, this opens a new box of searching and researching new possibilities.
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And here is a finished cake:
