 Hey everyone it's EJ from iDesign.com and today we're going to have a little bit of fun with spline dynamics and springs. With the combination of those two things I achieve this kind of look and this kind of effect where you have objects dangling off of strings basically and my string I made out of a string of pyramid objects. So let's just dive right in and I'll show you how to get that kind of look. So we're going to have, this is the object that I'm going to have dangling. It's one of my text edge effects bevel edge fonts. So we have our object already and set to go. I'm going to turn that off for now and first we're going to need to have our spring that we're going to actually need to dangle that text off of. So how I found to make a good straight line is by using a helix and just turning down the radius and bring down the subdivision to say 10. We can make this height a little bit higher do 600 and we're going to make that editable and you can see that we have a string with or a spline with 10 subdivisions now. All right so now we need to name this string and now we need to apply dynamics to it because we need to get it moving around and first I'm going to actually put this in a null because I just found it easier to you get grab control of this null and move the spline the string around as a whole. If you want to animate it later so there's just something I do in my workflow. So let's add some dynamics to this and we're going to go to hair tags and choose spline dynamics. So right away we just have a spline that drops and that's the same exact thing that would happen if you applied a dynamics tag to any object it just falls. So what we need to tell it is what what is this string going to connect to we're going to we're going to see that in the spline dynamics tag you have an option to fix your point kind of like with the cloth tag and we're going to do the same exact thing so we want this to hang from the very top point we're going to hit set and right away it doesn't drop anymore in fact if you now choose this null and move the null around you're getting some dynamic action going on but it's it's looking really jagged and wiggly and not exactly what we want and how we fix that is by changing the type of uh spline points we have and if I found if you use a B spline if we move this around now it's looking pretty it's looking nice it's looking exactly like uh you would expect it to move and look like uh if you actually had a real piece of string that you're messing around with so that's looking the way we want it to look so far we can actually now throw a sweep nerve on this with a with a circle profile so we can visually see our our string let's bring down the circle to see five so now I can actually let's throw a texture on this so now we can actually see it so now again if we move the null around now you have a good visual reference of uh of your string all right so now we need to bring back our object and now we need to dangle off of the string we're gonna try to visually match up the two all right so now we need to tell uh this e that it needs to dangle off of this and how we do that is first we need to add a uh a dynamics tag to the letter and that's good and it's just dropping exactly like how the the string was dropping when we didn't tell it uh what it was connected to or anything so now is where our spring comes in under dynamics bring the spring and you're confronted with these options of uh object a and an object b so basically what object is going to be connected to the one end what object is going to be connected to the other end in this case we have our the top of the object which is the top of the spring and the bottom object that's going to be dangling off of the bottom of the spring so already we know we need to stick the the b object in here and we're actually going to attach it with an offset and right away you can see that you have this uh let me actually bump this up uh you have a visual reference that doesn't render out well but you have a visual reference of what the spring is going to look like and you can see that we actually need to bring this up in the offset to actually make it look like it's working the way we want it to uh now we have to connect our string to the the e so how we're actually going to do that go to your constraint tag and it's the same thing where you set a point this time you actually set it to an object and that object is going to be that e and we need to select the not the top this time but the bottom uh point of the string and connect it to that e so we set and we hit play again got all kind of craziness going on we still have one more thing to do we still need to set that a object which is that string uh but we don't want the center of mass again we actually we can do offset again or we can actually choose a point selection and the point selection that we're going to want is the very top point so if we go set selection so we have that top point selected we're going to use that point as the top of the spring so we're going to throw that point selection in there go and hit play again still acting all wonky so obviously we need to still mess around with some settings first thing we're going to mess with is the rest length and what the rest length is is um how how how long is this uh length of the spring going to be so you can see as I bumped it down the spring is going much lower so now we can really start just uh tweaking these options in this offset to kind of see it's kind of rotating weirdly off that you need to kind of visually line it up to where we think where would that center of the letter is so you see that it's kind of lining up in the middle there let's go back so it's it's rotating a whole lot and we don't want that so what we're going to need to do is go into our force of the dynamic tag of the letter and bring the angular dampening down so it's kind of slowing down a little bit you can see our string is is connected but it's our spring that is just not uh set up right yet so sometimes you need to give it a little bit more slack or maybe it's actually too much slack because it's over over springing so we still need to bring this down a bit the rest at the bottom and so this string is fully straightened out so we just this uh rest length a little bit more and you can see that it's kind of dangling not at the very center top of the center of that e so you still have to kind of play around with the offset here so it uh rest evenly there so now we're getting pretty close to making this look like it's you know believable that this is hanging off there but of course we don't just want it to just kind of sit and hang there we want it to fall so to do that we just bring up the the letter here and since everything is connected uh including you know with the spring and the you know the splines are looking at or the spring is looking at these splines and everything else so once we move that up now it falls down so that that's looking pretty close to what i uh initially showed uh and the nice thing is is that uh say if you want to come in from an angle you want to kind of swing back and forth just move the the letter over there and initiate the dynamics and there you go uh another thing to keep in mind is um by adjusting the you know rotation and everything the dampening on the dynamics of the letter or whatever object you have dangling from it helps uh to kind of tame or increase the rotation so if you want a whole ton of rotation you'll leave that at zero but uh it's you know if you want to just kind of dampen that and you can also use follow rotation to really smooth smooth out that angle you can also use rotation to kind of slow it down that looks kind of weird maybe you don't want that kind of going on you can also do the same with uh the string so if you don't want it going all crazy like that initially uh you can jack the rubber up or down if you do it way down it's just like looking real real rubbery uh you can also do the stiffness you can adjust the drag so the drag kind of is like a dampener uh for the string as well so if you see that uh without that drag it's going all crazy this kind of brings that in a little bit so it kind of smooths everything out so let's actually bring this back over here because we want our text to just fall let's hit play so we actually you have to watch when you place this if you have it directly in the center that's when it's going to start tumbling over itself so you kind of want to have it offset a little bit like in front or behind so you kind of have to mess around and kind of see what what position what starting position works best so right there i mean that's looking pretty close to what i got to before uh this nice smooth uh not a lot of crazy rotation going on uh we can add a little bit of bounce if you want to um you can turn the dampening down so it bounces a little bit more okay so we got our e going pretty good we can actually ease up a little on the and your dampening and the angular dampening we thought the e is not landing uh front front words as i wanted to so let's just rotate that a little now we got it facing the right direction uh so like i had here i had these pyramids and i also had another letter interacting with the the other so we're halfway there uh so say you want uh like chains or uh you want like a chain effect or like i have here i just put some some pyramids um basically what you can do is you can actually clone along this so it's not just a string it's uh you know like uh like a dog tag kind of you can have some uh ball uh some spheres to make a dog tag kind of thing uh so i can let's make that really quick so basically all you have to do is go get your uh cloner drag the sphere in the cloner set the the mode to object and just throw the string in there and the the cloner will clone along that spline so if i bring this down you can kind of see what i was uh talking about if i turn off that sweep nerve and change the count to even bring that count up you kind of get this ball chain kind of effect thing going on we see that uh it's not exactly resting it's resting at an angle so we still need to adjust the offset a little tiny bit so that's looking pretty good so now we have one letter uh we just need to make the other letter now to have it interact dynamically with and it's pretty simple uh just need to bring all these put them into a null i'm gonna call it the e and so that's all still intact and good to go and we're just gonna duplicate that put a j um and all we need to do is just kind of reconnect everything so let's turn this guy off just do e2 because we just have another e um e2 just rename everything so it's uh just have everything organized okay so let's off as well so basically we just need to clear out our uh constraint and our spline and we just need to make sure that everything's uh connected right again and make sure that's e2 set that again and for our spring we got string two that's good point selection because this is actually still referencing that one so the point selection so make sure it's point selection two uh it's e2 good make sure this corner is string two that's good so there we go and actually it's already interacting with the other e so if we stop this bring this e so we get a little bit of swing swinging to the letter i'll just bring this over here bring this e over this way so you get probably have it swinging both ways so there you go got uh two letters swinging off these kind of ball chain dealies and looking pretty dang close to what i showed initially so there's a there's a ton of different things you can do uh with this further and i'll actually be showing that in my next tutorial um how to kind of reverse this to kind of get like a balloon kind of coming up and not falling down using the same kind of technique so i'll see you in the next uh part of the tutorial talk to you later bye