Rubber



The Rubber modifier allows you turn the whole object or part of it into a rubber or soft material, you can use vertex color information to select and weight the effect so you can define regiosn of no effect or regions of hard or soft rubber. This modifier is really useful for providing secondary realistic motion to parts of meshes for example antennas on alien creatures or tummies on fat dinosaurs or general squidgy behavior to a toon character all done without any hand animation the system responds to the movement of vertices in the world space to drive a physics simulation. You have control of softness of the ssytem as well as mass and gravity properties. And using vertex color data exported with the mesh you can weight the effect on a per vertex basis.

Rubber Param Description

Enabled

Is the modifier enabled or not.

Target

Normally the system will use the movement of the mesh object to drive the rubber simulation but you can choose to have the effect driven by another object, if so select it here, if you then move that object the vertices will move based on that movement and not the local movement.

Material

You can select the type of material the object is made from or choose Custom to set your own values. The base materials are:

    Soft Rubber
    Hard Rubber
    Jelly
    Latex
    Custom

Channel

Select the color channel to use as the vertex weight channel can be red, green, blue or alpha channel.

Stiff Channel

You can choose to vary the stiffness of the rubber either by a value for the whole mesh or via weights painted into a vertex color channel again either red, green, blue or alpha channel can be used.

Threshold

You can adjust the weighting by changing the threshold value, an vertex weight less than this value will be excluded from the simulation and weights for the vertices included normalized to the new range. You need to click the Apply Threshold button after changing this value.

Apply Threshold

This needs to be clicked to update the vertex weights if the threshold value is changed.

Intensity

You can change the overall intensity of the simulation in each direction, a value of 1 is the normal simulation, lower values will reduce the effect of the physics, higher values will increase it, each axis can have its own value.

Gravity

The amount of gravity to apply to each vertex in the physics simulation.

Damping

How quickly any movement is damped away, a value of 1 will mean no damping takes place, lower values will mean the movement dissipates quickly.

Mass

The mass for the system, higher values will cause a slower, heavier looking simulation, lower values a lighter quicker looking feel.

Stiffness

The stiffness in each direction for the physics, this can be adjusted on a per vertex basis using painted weights in a the vertex color channels.

Show Weights

Display the weight of each vertex, red is heavily weighted going through green for mid weights to blue for light weights.

Size

Size of the vertex weights.

Rubber Class

Video Example