Leaderboard

Hello Folks! Was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to create a membrane fusion effect similar to the following link: My best guess is there was some kind of volume builder on union mode with objects cloned on top to make the membrane. However I dont understand how they managed to make the clones so stable while cloned onto a volume builder. I have tried this approach and anything cloned to the volumebuilder geometry is unbearably jittery once it starts to do the union operation. It seems there is some kind of field driving something in between the two hemispheres in the video but cant quite hack what they've done here. Would love some other people's take on how the scene was made! Thanks!

One possibility is to have a Remesh normalize the topology of the Volume Builder... It will definitely reduce jittering but it won't remove it completely. The other possibility is using some kind of hybrid-dynamics like clones attracted on the surface of two spheres but use Push Apart Effector instead of collisions to make room for the incoming clones... Maybe this will work faster/better using particles as matrix-points and some Follow Position under the RigidBody Tag... There is also the "Fake Dynamics" possibility... You don't see Clones, you see a shader with SubPolygon Displacement... If this is Blender's UI, it has a very powerful Vector Displacement workflow. I also smell something simpler hidden under some kind of modifier/morph or rigged animation... The way the two spheres weld doesn't look like the typical SDF effect. It's like the two underlying meshes were post-spheriphied and the mesh at the touch point just unwraps... The connection border is still visible after the merge. The two spheres retain their unique topological polygon density indicating the absence of a parent generator for the whole system.