Okay, I did kinda wonder why metaballs were represented in the list as a sort of wobbly weird thing, yet they arrive as simple spheres... okay so now I've just seen the "Modeling in Bryce Question" - and someone was using metaballs and hey preston - there's a snake! Maybe not so simple then... How come? What ARE metaballs? How do you use them?

they're like spheres, but kind of like a magnetic liquid...the shape of the metaball responds and stretches to connect to other nearby metaballs.

Think of a sphere that can 'reach out and touch' others of it's own kind... with a given strength and size, a metaball deforms to meld with others. The closer they are the stronger the connection between the two. The blobs can run together and merge if they are close enough, or a negative metaball can indent another. The area of the metaball that reaches out is rendered fluidly/smoothly. Thus you can create more organic/natural items, such as raindrops, muscles, etc. Note: they only do this magic trick between metaballs... if you throw a regular sphere into the mix, it just sits there.. grin

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=940411

Fran: To give you some idea of what is possible with metaballs, here's a link to my last image. It's all metaballs except for the rain. You can see how the texture of one metaball "bleeds" into one with a different texture.

Ooooh, I wonder what would happen to my fire if I removed the spheres and replaced them with metaballs.... Fascinating! Thanks all. Oh, tjohn, loved the birth of earths...

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=451360

Also check out Ornlu's gallery. he used metabals for some striking liquid images.....

Message edited on: 05/07/2005 22:11

Fran--in case you didn't know yet, you can't make metaballs negative in the attributes box. This does diddly squat. Instead, hold the shift key while you make your metaball. Don't ask me why they do this strange and convoluted, confusing and ultimately idiotic run-around, but they do. The above demonstrates this. The green metaball is negative, while the blue one is positive. Also you should know that metaballs are only affected by other metaballs within their respective bounding boxes. The closer they are, the more they are "glopped" together. This can make for some really cool liquid animations.

And you can only boolean a metaball with another metaball not a primitive.

Right but the real bummer is the other way around... you can't cut pieces out of metaball with a primitive. This is extremely annoying and would be quite useful.

Zhann, Thanks for the link, Ornlu has some interesting stuff there. shinyary2, Aha! VERY helpful, thanks for the tip, I didn't know. Did a little playing with it, and came up with this: Gel breast implant anybody??? (ggg)

How about metaball glass dog pooh? Yeah, metaballs are fun. Little weird to work with, but fun. ;o) AS

EEeewwwwwww! If only you hadn't told me what it was supposed to be...

http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=155388&Start=91&Artist=Rayraz&ByArtist=Yes

http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=155387&Start=91&Artist=Rayraz&ByArtist=Yes

Which ones are the 4 spheres? Nice alien!

Does anyone remember Terminator 2? The upgraded Terminator badguy was made of liquid metal. When he had bits blasted off of him, they pieces sorted of rolled back to him to make him whole again. That's how I look at metaballs......always trying to suckup to each other. It's a great idea but can be very hard to get right.

the spheres are the eyeballs :)

Which raises a question about these sorts of things that I have had for a long time. I know that if you group metaballs, they will only join with other metaballs in their group. But is it possible to have a metaball join with one metaball in the group, but not another one? Okay, that's confusing... say you want to create a cute little alien. Say you want this cute little alien to have arms and legs, like a person. And say you want to have these arms just hanging loosely at his sides. You move the metaball-created arms close to his metaball-created sides, and hey presto! His arms join into his sides and suddenly you have Rico, the armless alien!!! Very annoying.

yes do extra groups for the joints

Here's a few examples of hundreds of metaball images I've done over the years... Definately my favorite way of Brycing !! Joe

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=365216&Start=37&Artist=Gog%5FCA1&ByArtist=Yes

I bow down to Englewolf's expertise, he's done some of the best use of meta's I've seen, and Ornlu's liquid simulations are incredible, but I like to use metaballs for Organics. No one appears to have mentioned one of my favourite aspects of metaballs, texture blending, as well as the blobs skinning and blending , the textures do too!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=961438

In order to build a creature with metaballs you have to form the limbs in groups, this includes fingers/toes. This is how I did it with my dragons, also used cylinders to form the bones so they were posable.

Hey EngleWolf, Love those things you made. If you made a metaball spaceship could you still sit a person inside and see him/her from the outside? Gog_CA1, Oh, I love the colours on that creature's belly - is that the textures blending that you mentioned? If yes, how do you do that? Aldaron, Love those dragons - did you ever do any more work on them? And how did you do the membranes on the wings? Fran

No I didn't do anything else except the one pic in my gallery. The wing membranes I wasn't too happy with but they are just flattened metaballs.

Gog: "No one appears to have mentioned one of my favourite aspects of metaballs, texture blending..." I did, LOL. Tjohn

Sorry tJohn, it just didn't register (the brain is slowing down lately due to consistent overload conditions)

Aldaron: That's fine, but then how do you get the metaballs to join at the shoulder? What I want is to have the metaballs join at the shoulder, but be right next to the side without joining that. As far as I can tell from your dragons, you didn't really accomplish this either. From which I gather that it is impossible with the current capabilities of Bryce. Which is something that they should implement in Bryce6. Or else better modeling capibilities. Or both, for that matter.