I may be trying to reanimate part of the earliest stages of the 
development of the heart. This is for educational purposes, just to be 
able to tell what is going on. We have microscopic reconstructions of a 
number of stages. The object is mainly 2 dimensional but highly curved. 
What I need to do is fit some object with far fewer parameters than the 
original voxel data. Do that for one stage and use only deformation to 
get to the next level that is in general more complicated. There has to 
be a smooth interpolation between stages and the should be UV mapped 
because we want to show additional data in color.

I think I can mostly get away with a set of bezier surfaces, but I did 
not like the control I had in blender when I tried something similar a 
few years ago. At that time I decided to fall back on Matlab to write 
the necessary SDL files. It seems to me that most of the support for 
animation in various programs is more aimed at animating objects than on 
growing and changing.

What would the knowledgeable people here recommend?
- use blender, perhaps a different primitive (I do use blender 
regularly, but only the basics)
- wings or another program?
- any other suggestions?

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news:497### [at] hotmailcom...
> What would the knowledgeable people here recommend?
> - use blender, perhaps a different primitive (I do use blender regularly, 
> but only the basics)
> - wings or another program?
> - any other suggestions?

This sounds pretty straightforward to do with any commercial 3D application, 
either using parametric objects (spline-based etc.), vertex-based animation 
or deformers depending on what you want to do (FWIW just tried Blender for 
the umpth time and I'd rather not comment on it).

G.

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perhaps I should add some images to give an idea.
What I already made was 
http://members.chello.nl/a.c.linnenbank/visitekaart/hearttube.mov

now we want something that starts out about as simple as that does, 
perhaps slightly more detail and less symmetrical. Then it should 
transform to a more abstract version of the top object in the attached 
figure and then into the bottom one (were the tube is formed, curved and 
in the middle disconnected from the rest.) BTW all this happens in a few 
hours, impressive isn't it.

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Attachments:
Download 'tmp.jpg' (52 KB)

Preview of image 'tmp.jpg'

On 17-Jan-09 18:55, Gilles Tran wrote:

> news:497### [at] hotmailcom...
>> What would the knowledgeable people here recommend?
>> - use blender, perhaps a different primitive (I do use blender 
>> regularly, but only the basics)
>> - wings or another program?
>> - any other suggestions?
> 
> This sounds pretty straightforward to do with any commercial 3D 
> application, either using parametric objects (spline-based etc.), 
> vertex-based animation or deformers depending on what you want to do 
> (FWIW just tried Blender for the umpth time and I'd rather not comment 
> on it).

which one would you recommend (not that I have any spare money to burn).

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news:497### [at] hotmailcom...

> which one would you recommend (not that I have any spare money to burn).
I've been using C4D for a while now. It's quite easy to use so it's popular 
with little animation studios. You can test drive the latest version (IIRC 
it's fully functional for 40 days) from Maxon's site. The base module is 
about 700 ? before taxes. Here's a little test I did in a few minutes. It's 
vertex-based animation using one single low-poly mesh (with subdivision). 
Note that your problem is slightly more complicated since the topology of 
the object changes over time.


G.

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Attachments:
Download 'tubetest.avi.dat' (218 KB)