How to animate deformed mesh

I want to show a hole being formed on an object,how?


  1. Start off with the second mesh you have shown here, i.e. a plane with a hole in it.

  2. Add a bone at the centre of the hole, make sure the bone’s tail is at the centre, the head should be at right angles to the plane.

3)Parent the mesh to the armature; CTRL+P > “With Empty Groups”

  1. Assign only the vertices around the hole to the bone.

  2. Scale the bone in Pose Mode - when your scale gets to 0 the hole disappears, scale it back up to 1 to see the hole again. Keyframe across a range of time.

Hope this helps you, this may not be the only way or the best, but it works.

Cheers, Clock.

Could you please do me a favor and show it to me practically ?

Here you go… :smiley:


vanishing-hole.blend (471 KB)

Just press Play to see it work. You might like to add a Sub-Division Modifier to smooth it all out.

Cheers, Clock.

EDIT:

I have just noticed there is an unwanted edge loop in there near the outside - just delete that…

just make a shape it easy.
When you scale your bone to zero it is gone and you can not see it.

Not sure what you are saying there my friend…

You could add a second bone then add a Transform to the first bone, so when you scale the second bone by say 0.5, it scales the first bone to 0, that way you can always find the operating object in the 3D view. What I do it to find the first bone in the Outliner window, then key values into the bone’s transform boxes and then RMB-click these boxes to key-frame the values. I have also tried extruding the plane to make a cube with a hole through it, for this I only keyframe X and Z values of the bone so it does not scale the hole along the bone’s Y axis.

Cheers, Clock.

Why not use shape keys? One shape key for the part+hole, one for the same part with the inner loop scaled down to 0. No bones involved, animatable by a simple value spinner.

Good idea @Meshmonkey - I have not got as far as using shape keys myself yet…

Cheers, Clock.

Thank you everyone,the problem is solved.

“just make a shape it easy.”
I can’t even say English is my second language. That is so sad.


We all ave daze when we speag gibberish… the older we get the more frequent they become :smiley:

Cheers, Clock.