Meta objects?

[sulkybunny]

Hello smart people.. 

I am trying to find the best way to achieve the following effect..   the project involves having an object which is constantly changing.. think sphere into octopus to a man to a car...    not worried about shader at all.. just want the ability to merge together different geometries so they appear as one.. a little like meta particles do..   soft and fluid clay like material that morphs into diffetenet things. 

my research is narrowing around liquid..  if I “convert“ two objects into a liquid form.. once they come in contact.. they merge into one..   any ideas on that?  Can a geo just be converted. Or do I need to create sticky liquid.. 

another direction of research is the Arnold volume which I though might be able to create a sort of soft bridge between two polymeshes (rendered as soft volumes)

any ideas wiuld be welcome.. 

[jordan.giboney]

Hi @sulkybunny 

Thank you for posting! I was chatting with @sean.heasley and he showed me the following video wherein they are using Blendshapes: Dev Discussion - Blood Trail (warning: graphic content)

Otherwise I think you are on the right track with the liquids idea 🙂 Are you following a tutorial at all? Any in-progress files we can take a peek at?

Thanks again for being a part of our community!

[dinofiguera]

The best way is to use VDB,

It is a node library created by DreamWorks, to be able to operate with volumes.
you can create all of your geometries made of different parts and then convert 
all into volumes.
when volumes, the object can be seamlessly merged, combined, subtracted, smoothed out, all kind of things.
You have to install the library of VDB from Maya, then access the VDB nodes in the nodeY Editor.
You can find a tutorial online on how to connect them.

https://www.openvdb.org/download/
Cheers
D

[jordan.giboney]

Hi @sulkybunny 

Just wanted to check in and see how things were going 🙂 Any progress with your project?

In addition to @dinofiguera's suggestion, I wanted to share these links regarding VDB in Maya with Arnold:

• OpenVDB Workflow - Arnold for Maya
• Realistic Smoke in Maya with Arnold

Let us know how your project is going 🙂 We would love to see WIP pics!

[sulkybunny]

Thanks ..

i haven’t found a tutorial yet.. but it made sense to me that it would be either volume rendering or liquid .. this is a long running project so at the moment no info to share .. 

if u bump into a related tutorial or article I would love to read it! Thanks