Deformer component tag stuff

[Steve Davy]

Delving into the newish deformer component tag system in a bit more depth.

It seems powerful, but is pretty complicated (aka Maya convoluted) beyond doing very basic stuff with it, and already scratching my head at something that seems like it should be simple.

Essentially I want a squash-stretch non linear on a cylinder, and simply want to exclude an arbitrary section of it from the deformation.

Seemed like a simple falloff primitive would be the answer, but I was pretty perplexed to find there isn't an "invert" option on this falloff anywhere to be found in order to exclude rather than include a region, such as there in the MASH nodes etc. Why on earth not. Editing the falloff curve to reverse it also didn't really work and led to weird results.

I then looked into using a blend falloff and two primitives on either side of the excluded region. This kind of worked but seemed to prevent the deformer from working as expected (essentially I was getting stretch but no squash!).

Does anyone know how to get a setup like this working? I don't want to use a component tag to exclude an explicit set of vertices (which would work) as I would like to be able to move the excluded region at will.

[stephen mann]

I don’t know if you got any response for this 

  But you can paint weights for non linear deformers. Just like clusters and joints. 

hth 

-=s

On Feb 1, 2025, at 6:16 PM, Steve Davy <stevi...@hotmail.com> wrote:



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[stephen mann]

Oh and the whole point of deformer tags 

 Is that you can “tag” components and then tell the deformer to either include or exclude those tagged items 

Unlike paint weights.  You can update the tagged components as geometry topology changes or switch out  

-=s

On Feb 9, 2025, at 9:13 PM, stephen mann <stephe...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don’t know if you got any response for this 

[desig...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the explanation Stephen. I kind of agree with Steve though, that the way they implemented these features could have been extremely simple, but they are confusing. 

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[Steve Davy]

Hi Steve, yes I'm aware of that but I needed to have all verts fully inside the set since the effect I wanted to achieve required animating the falloff object (think like a lump moving along a pipe).

Anyhoo, turns out I was able to get kind of what I was looking for by inverting the falloff object's influence, despite what I'd said in my OP.

In general I do like the new power of this system, which previously I think required some convoluted node wiring.

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From: maya...@googlegroups.com <maya...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of stephen mann <stephe...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 9, 2025 6:13 PM
To: maya...@googlegroups.com <maya...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Maya Group <maya...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [maya_he3d] Deformer component tag stuff

 

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