Tentacle rig, drive transform with noise

[johan Borgström]

Hi!

I am developing a rig that will be used to animate a tentacle-like creature. I have built the rig in a "layered" style so that I can control the different movements separately. The base rig is setup and working fine, what I am working on now is to add a more organic feel to the movement. I am thinking to add subtle movement with some sort of noise node.

If I were to do this in 3d I am thinking of using a 3d noise texture (like solid fractal). Based on the world position I would like to look up the noise value and use that to offset translation in one axis. Does anyone have any ideas or tips of how to do this?

Another idea is to do this in 2d, using a fractal 2d node. It would be great to use just one fractal node to drive the offsets of multiple transform. I guess it also involves som sort of lookup of the value, maybe using a ramp?

Any ides, tips, links etc will be appreciated!

Best regards,

Johan

[johan Borgström]

FYI,

Here is a link to the wip rig.

https://vimeo.com/105551966

[Andres Weber]

I've actually been looking for a solution to this myself.  You can always use expressions or plugins, but I'm not sure about how to do it purely with nodes.

openMaya way of doing it
http://mayastation.typepad.com/maya-station/2011/03/how-to-sample-a-3d-texture.html

Soup can do it with textureToArray nodes I believe
http://www.soup-dev.com/wiki/Nodes.html

I think there's also a mel equivalent of using colorAtPoint but you'd need to have a surface to calculate the UV position from so that's probably the slowest of the 3.

For the noise I got nothing, I always make multiples or just use the RGB values individually and hope I don't have too many!  But also expressions would work in this situation...I just hate them.