Hi all,
I’m trying to model this kind of soft, twisting “kink” surface (see attached pink Screenshot) — basically gentle creases that flow across a body.
My approach (attached grey screenshot) so far: I generate the base surface, lay several guide curves on it, and use them as a mulltple curves attractor worksflow to push the surface points outward, using graph mapper to control the falloff
It sort of works, but it looks off. Two things I can’t get right:
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Falloff to the sides of each crease is hard to control — the transition either stays too sharp or smears out across the whole surface. Also only affect a few distance pts would be great
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Falloff toward the start and end of each curve. The deformation just stops abruptly at the curve ends, so I get little spikes/pinches instead of the crease fading out smoothly into the surface.
Is there a cleaner way to handle this? Specifically:
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A good plugin for curve-attractor deformation with proper falloff? (I’ve looked at Pufferfish, Hetepora and Dendro allready a bit)?
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How do people usually fade the effect along the curve parameter, not just perpendicular to it?
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Is my attractor workflow right here or would a tweening approach make more sense
Any pointers for directions, plugins or example definitions would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!
If you work in UV space you can always use eg. A Gaussian graph mapper to multiply your transform so it fades at start and end..
If you work across domain space(wrapping 0-1-0 etc) with whatever transformation/deformation strategy that isn’t wrapping 100% clean, a very slight blur numbers can be helpful
File would help 
The image represents a curve closest point deform alogorithm ,Im busy right now , but I can make it in a few hours
It can be done this way :
Kinky-Srf.gh (34.4 KB)
Did some Curve Attractors on a flat surface in the past. Many of problems in this file, very WIP…
Was hoping, there might be some nice plugin just for this purpose.
Kinky_Srf_01.gh (19.1 KB)
Hey Ali, looks great, will look inside ASAP. MAny thx allready for this
Love the Iso curve part and the way you random multiplied and fragmented the curves.The last part has some simularities to my very WIP file. Yours is looking much better though!
Main Difference is my file has only 3 attractor curves, yours has many more curves. Your kinks seem to be better articulated.
Will examine your file more in depth…
Edited my file a bit with Ali’s input. But there are still a few things I don’t like:
- all points get affected somehow, also the ones on top and bottom, which are far away from the attractor curves
- when the attractor has only a few input curves, the profile of the kink could be sharper
- the falloff at start and end could be much nicer
- when many surface points the kink gets jagged, but that’s somthing that could get fixed later
Kinky_Srf_02.gh (13.1 KB)
A quick Dendro/QuadRemesh test turned out interesting…
Quite happy with the outcome. Dendro solved the start / end falloff, by assigning different radius to the curve voxel pts
