Note: The images in this tutorial are large for clarity, viewing on smaller monitors may require horizontal scrolling, and the load time may be long on slower connections.
This tutorial introduces animated NURBS trim patches, and the benefits of using an object library during creation of a simple animation. The NURBS animation possibilities built into trueSpace5 are magical. A unique style/variety of workflow make them a joy to use, inspiring creativity and experimentation in the artist. While much of the magic belongs to the "construction history" concept of NURBS, this tutorial was written to show other features. It will show you how to create a simple animated flower using techniques you can use as building blocks for more complex projects.
Fig.1 Right click the NURBS plane primitive icon and set the resolution to 4. This will give you extra control vertices for later refinement of the model if desired. We'll use the default tS5 grid to help draw our curves.
Fig. 2 Right clicking the plane reveals isoparms and opens the context editing menu. Clicking the menu handle will expand it to show all options. You will also see the rotary controller which we'll use to rotate the plane as shown.
Fig. 3 We've turned the plane to provide alignment with the grid for both curve drawing and isoparm editing purposes. Here I've used the trim tool to place five curve points on the plane to create a flower petal. Note the difference in function between the two trim tools. One trims off the outside of a drawn curve, the other creates a hole. Right click an empty spot of the workspace to exit edit mode, or do this by selecting the object tool (white arrow). You can insert this object into a new object library if you wish.
Fig. 4 Right click the petal to enter edit mode and advance the current keyframe to a future point. Here I've entered 60 which will equal two seconds of 30fps animation. Right click the play arrow and ensure that AutoRecord is checked. Change the shape of the plane by selecting control vertices or isoparms and using the move/rotate/scale tools. There's no set way to do this, experimenting will teach you more than following my explicit instruction could at this point. This screenshot was done by point selecting and multiple point selecting (use Ctrl key). I rotated using top view and moved up the Z axis in perspective view.
Fig. 5 The premise here is to create a blooming flower, so open the KFE (aka Key Frame Editor). Expand until you can see the PatchPoints keyframes. You can now drag a rectangular lasso to select them both. Clicking the "reverse" tool will swap the keyframes so that our petal will transition from closed to open.
Fig. 6 If you haven't done so, now is a good time to create a new object library. Click the object library icon and then right click an empty space within it. You'll see an option to create a new library. Similarly, right click within your new library and select "insert" while your animated flower petal is selected. It will be inserted, animation and all. Note that you may prefer to texture the petal first to avoid having to texture each petal of the flower separately later.
Fig. 7 Drag and place flower petals into an arrangement such as this. The object selector makes quick work of rotating and moving them into position, and the grid makes a great placement reference. I worked in transparent solid display mode here to view the best alignment. Once placed, glue these together and save (insert) the result to your object library. Note that at this stage we've created a rather large flower. At some point we may wish to scale down, it's always easy to do this in trueSpace.
Fig. 8 You can see my object library and KFE in this screen capture. The library serves as an easy means of backup as well as a visual construction kit. I textured my petals, made a quick center part of the flower and glued them together. Of course I saved the result into the library. It certainly isn't necessary to stop now, you can continue to add an animated stem and leaves to your library, maybe even several different versions of each. I suggest trying open ended NURBS cylinders with animated blends between them for the stems, and perhaps more NURBS trims for the leaves. Of course there is no reason not to combine polygonal or subdivision surfaced objects with NURBS.
What I find most useful is that now we can assemble an animated field of flowers quite quickly and easily by drag placing components into a scene. This method holds true for all trueSpace5 animation and is just a hint of the power of libraries.
Here's our tutorial animation in action. The scene took maybe two minutes to set up! I almost forgot to tell you something important about animated NURBS trims... the curve points of a trim can be animated as well. Meaning, you can animate the shape of trims. In the smile animation below you can see a simple example.
