How would you.....

[CliveG]

I want to produce some plastic type shapes that mimic ribbons waving in the wind. I have in mind that these will be gently undulating with the waves getting closer together but shallower, towards the origin. These 'ribbons' will also curve and twist gently too along the whole length.

 

I think this should be a fairly easy challenge for Max, but am curious as to how the guns here would approach this.

 

I could laboriously model this, but figure that this would look contrived and it should be fairly simple with the right use of modifiers. (I bet there's a plugin if I was doing a lot too)

 

But should I just run a curving spline then loft / sweep a profile and apply wave or ripple and twist modifiers to that , or should I use a box primitive and apply bend modifiers then wave / ripple modifiers to that. Which would achieve the best result and which would have the best / easiest mapping?

 

I'm curious what you guy's would do for the most convincing ribbons?

 

Thanks

[cg_Butler]

Definitely no better way than to actually animate it using a cloth simulation , wind and gravity! You'll get good results if it's done well. Or path deformations........read up on those to kick start you off.....

[Francisco Penaloza]

Well it can be a 1000 ways to do this for sure, or maybe 990

Cloth modifier can create a more random flexible effect for sure, but it can be very Hardware demanding, you can also use Flex modifier, with Wind or wave deformers it should work fine.

apply some moving noise with a big scale also can produce good deformations.

You can also select and attach vertex to dummies and create a rig for it, then you can absolute control how your ribbons will move, or apply a random noise modifier to one of them and use particle system to generate a big group of them flying around or to a target location.

[Nic H]

i would do it with cloth sim on low res ribbons -then either turbosmooth them afterwards, or meshwrap a more detail ribbon to them afterwards

using gravity and wind

its not that controllable but would give you good natural results

[CliveG]

Excellent guys thanks, I should have said that it's for a still view and that I need control of the general form of these plastic "ribbons", the start point, end point and direction, but I want them to look naturally rippled and wind blown apart from that, so I think a simulation may be hard for me to maintain sufficient control.

 

Anyway plenty to try there.

 

Cheers