Does anybody actually use them? If so, for what? Personally, I.ve never found any use for them, but that may just be my lack of imagination.
(And please, don’t start a flame war about the pros and cons, I’m just genuinely interested to hear what they may be good for in everyday use.)
In the “olden days” (pre-2.5X) I used metabals in combination with particles to create liquid/mud.
I experimented with using metaballs in a particle system to create snow-layers some time ago but I never really got it to work correctly and it crashed more often than not (Blender 2.5x.)
I imagine that if a developer updated the code a bit to make it more stable you could actually use them for some nice things.
I believe this was made with metaballs:
Metaballs can be very useful in very specific types of animations, but mainly they’re good for blocking out organic shapes, being converted into a proper mesh and then sculpted. Some examples of where they can be useful in other ways:
-Cell division animation
-Raindrops on a window (use a hair particle system, they combine nicely to form droplets with the right settings)
-Animating the join between two surfaces
You’re right, they aren’t really used that much. But they are useful. Its a shame they can really slow down a system. On the bright side, blender’s metaballs are the most efficient I’ve come across. I don’t like maya’s, or vray’s.
Really I would rather they replace metaballs with something more like a metamesh capable of representing a volume of any shape. Imagine the use for things like meshing multi-jointed curves (think skin modifier but far superior). Modifiers that work like displacement but never self intersect since the displacement occurs to the underlying volume data. Etc.