- [Narrator] We put out an animation a little while ago
for Breast Cancer Awareness Month
that featured the iconic ribbon
that kind of loops through
goes through its motion there,
and then we talk about the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene,
but it was pretty tricky to get it
to get right into the perfect twist and rotation here.
So I wanted to show real quickly how we put that together.
We used some spline tools, some of these new tools
and I don't think otherwise it would have been possible.
So there's a new tool called Freehand.
We're all familiar with how to draw
a spline using the Bezier method.
Well Freehand, you can just kind of draw it on free hand.
And then there's some other tools that are really nice.
So Freehand, let me turn this guy
vertex ticks on so we can see what is going on here.
So those are all the verts that look pretty ugly.
You can, you know, raise or lower those verts.
But what I'm gonna do is take something
called Spline Relax, which essentially
takes that spline and relaxes it, like the Relax modifier
you're familiar with for geometry.
So it takes something that's a little rough
and smooths it out really nicely.
From there, there's another tool
called Normalize Spline 2,
works similar to Normalize Spline,
but it has some cool things where you can
explicitly call out, hey I just want
20 knots or, you know, 30 knots.
However many you want there, you can use straight segments.
You can have it retain existing knots
if they're within a certain distance.
So I'm just gonna turn that here,
10 looks pretty good.
And then I'm going to manipulate the shape a little bit
so that it doesn't loop right over itself.
Give it a little bit of space.
So add another poly, I'm going to Edit Spline rather
and you can grab one of these verts,
use Soft Selection, edges, maybe 15
and crank up the fall off a little bit.
You know, this will give me the ability
to just grab one side of the piece.
Okay, so I've got that separated a little bit.
Now from the spline, I'm going to create
the ribbon geometry to Path Deform onto it.
I'm just going to make that out of a plane
and build that up here.
And that looks good. Turn it to pink.
And then throw on Path Deform 2.
Path Deform 2 is great.
It allows you to put modifiers above it in the stack
since it's in a object space, not world space,
but it also then will apply and stick
right onto this piece of geometry.
So I'll pop that on there, get the right access going.
There it is.
So it's on the Z.
So that looks pretty good.
I'm gonna just change the width
and the length of it a little bit.
Put it to 50% so it's right in the middle.
So this is cool, the issue we were finding
is we want this top section to twist.
I can rotate, if I put on the right axis here,
I can rotate this guy around, but it all rotates relative
you know, evenly.
So I want the top portion to be rotated.
I want these bottom portions to be flat.
You could twist it, but as you see
that kind of just twists it one side,
and that's not exactly what we want.
So there's this cool feature in here
down to the bottom of the plug-in
called Driven Rotation.
It's gonna drive the rotation
based off of another object.
So I'll create another spline here up above,
push this guy up a little bit,
subdivide him maybe 10 times or so.
It has a little bit of a bias here.
Go ahead and throw a Normalize Spline
on that to even that out.
Normalize Spline 2, which is one
of the spline tools plugins.
So now it's all nice and even there,
and I can even collapse this back down
to Editable Spline.
To be able to use this as a rotation,
first, I need to enable this
and associate this spline with this piece here,
and then determine which axis we're using.
So we're using Z,
and I can give you an idea of how this works.
If I'm on this spline, if you grab a vert
here in the middle and do a Soft Selection,
it's rotating 50% on this spline.
Yeah, that rotation happens right there.
So there's some interesting controls
on the actual Path to Form.
Click off this, so Object Mode here.
Back onto the Path to Form, you see a scale.
So crank up that scale, you can go
to where you think it looks about right.
And then you're able to take this spline
and control a very specific twist,
which otherwise would be really tricky.
So now I can, back to my Path to Form 2,
you know it flies right through that,
and it makes for this really nice shape.
This allows you to kind of control
and direct your splines
and this Path to Form spline tools plugin
really helped us direct and get this spot
looking exactly like we wanted.
If you'd like to see the full animation
or see little bit more about the work
we produce at Elara Systems, just head over
to elarasystems.com.
It's in Portfolio Animations
and the full length piece is hosted out there.
So take a look and let us know what you think.
Thanks.