D-Form

Toonces

I've started playing with D-Formers. Cool stuff!

My question is, what is the D-Form symbol supposed to represent. It looks odd...like an upside-down red/yellow circular arrow. I feel it's supposed to symbolize something, perhaps a mortar and pestle?

Also, can Zbrush do any deformations that this tool cannot do? I watched a Zbrush tutorial and saw it could do symmetrical deforming, so perhaps that's the main difference in the functionality.

Richard Haseltine

It is an arrow, with the decoration providing guidance on orientation (the red bar up the shaft of the arrow relative to the red arrow on the disc shows how much the DForm is twisted, for example) and effect. The arrow is curved to indicate the spherical fall-off in strength of the field (it won't change if you edit the fall-off curve, though).

Yes, ZBrush will do a lot that a DForm won't - a little of which could be done with a Push Modifier and weight-map.

Toonces

Ah, that makes sense. I think it's pretty easy to use, but the shape confused me at first. Plus I thought it needed to be close to the weighted verticies, but it doesn't. You can put it virtually anywhere. Apparently if you use scaling or 'twisting' it needs to be closer to the selected verticies for some reason (haven't tested that much), but for most common stuff (i.e., translation), you can have it far away.

I'll have to check out zbrush. Heard a lot of good things about it.

Thanks!

Richard Haseltine

The base is the centre of rotation/scaling. That doesn't always mean it has to be close, but it certainly means that the location matters. Translation doesn't have a centre so the location of the base is irrelevant for that.

Toonces

Ah, ok, the center. I watched a tutorial where it said it was the 'start', and I couldn't make sense of that. Center makes more sense.

So if I wanted to blow up a 3D balloon, I'd get the base into the center of the balloon object...inside it...and scale the deformer bigger.

Got it.