Control Points Motor

Overview

Control Points Motor deforms the mesh region via user defined control points located around the mesh.

Installation Requirements

This motor requires a mesh region to be installed.

Usage

Control Points Motor is a very powerful general purpose mesh deformation tool. The user first clicks on Edit Motor with the motor selected to start using the Control Points Motor.

Once in Edit Motor mode, the user will see the following:

There are 2 modes available: Author and Animate. In Author mode, the user can click Add to add additional control points onto the mesh region. The user clicks Edit to move the control point and resize its radius of influence.

Once the control points have been setup, the user clicks Animate:

In this mode, control points are animated along the timeline. The 3 options available for animation are Translation, Rotation and Scaling. Fancy mesh deformation effects can be achieved through the use of these animation modes. For example, a breathing body can be animated by scaling the control point up and down over a series of frames.

Lastly, there is an additonal option:

Check this option if you are trying to achieve complex effects like "growing" a mesh along a path of bones. This is useful to animate growing vines or the lashing out of a creature's tongue.

Animatable Properties

• Translation, Rotation and Scaling for Points Each control point added to the motor contains properties for translation, rotation and scaling operations. Mesh points are deformed according to the radius of influence defined by each control point.