HOME | DD

Description

Made in Blender 2.81a

Yeah uh, prior to this point I made my bulges with the softbody modifier in Blender. It gives me the ability to deform my models how I want, not depending on any pre-defined shapekeys; but one of its downsides is its heavy calculation time.

BUT I stumbled upon a possible different way to get those deformations, from this post. The idea is actually pretty smart to me: you use 2 modifiers, the Vertex_Weigth_Proximity modifier and the displace modifier. The first one changes the values of a vertex group depending on the proximity of a chosen objects geometry, and this vertex group is then used by the displace modifier, because if you don't give it a texture to work with it still deforms all vertices, just with the same value, but still according to the individual vertex weight.

It of course, like almost everything else in blender that seems cool at first, has its own downsides, which I'm currently trying to overcome, again through the creation of a script.

For instance you can't actually move your proximity-object through your model, it will just clip through and the bulge will become smaller and deformed. I made the picture above by repeating the deform process and "saving" the prior shape to use that as the new shape for the next repeat again. The result doesn't look bad, but at this point I wasnt able to make it bulge more, I might have found some avoidable reasons for that already though.

The most important upside however and why I'm trying to get invested in this technique is that it goes easy on your computer. Meaning you can easily deform models with a big vertex-density, unlike the softbody modifier. This means you can get more detailed deformations.

Description

Made in Blender 2.81a

Yeah uh, prior to this point I made my bulges with the softbody modifier in Blender. It gives me the ability to deform my models how I want, not depending on any pre-defined shapekeys; but one of its downsides is its heavy calculation time.

BUT I stumbled upon a possible different way to get those deformations, from this post. The idea is actually pretty smart to me: you use 2 modifiers, the Vertex_Weigth_Proximity modifier and the displace modifier. The first one changes the values of a vertex group depending on the proximity of a chosen objects geometry, and this vertex group is then used by the displace modifier, because if you don't give it a texture to work with it still deforms all vertices, just with the same value, but still according to the individual vertex weight.

It of course, like almost everything else in blender that seems cool at first, has its own downsides, which I'm currently trying to overcome, again through the creation of a script.

For instance you can't actually move your proximity-object through your model, it will just clip through and the bulge will become smaller and deformed. I made the picture above by repeating the deform process and "saving" the prior shape to use that as the new shape for the next repeat again. The result doesn't look bad, but at this point I wasnt able to make it bulge more, I might have found some avoidable reasons for that already though.

The most important upside however and why I'm trying to get invested in this technique is that it goes easy on your computer. Meaning you can easily deform models with a big vertex-density, unlike the softbody modifier. This means you can get more detailed deformations.