I’m playing around with trying to rig a book, and my main challenge turned out to be the one I thought would be the easiest.
So the thing I struggle with is the pages, my first though was that the pages could just be rotated, and then get it’s “dynamic look” driven with a bend-deformer. However when I actually tried to do this, it occured to me that I can’t rotate the pages at all, because the base of each individual page will have to bend relative to which position it has in the book, and relative to the “spine” of the book (all of the pages is constrained to this).
Lets say the book is placed on the grid with the front cover opened, if I then were to flip the first page over 180 degrees, it will have to bend (at the bottom) as the base of the book is unchanged. Ok, great… So what if I were to open the book from the middle, with half of the pages turned to the left, and the other half to the right.
This is how it looks with rotations:
So I thought I could just add a bend-deformer to each individual page, but as each page will have different bend relative to which index they have, this doesn’t work:
My third attempt was to have one bend-deformer placed at the first and last index’ position (affecting all pages), and this gets pretty close to what I want. However there’s two problems, the first one is that the length of the pages stretches based on how far it is from the bend-deformer. The second problem is that the page(s) farthest from the bend-deformer requires denser geometry because they get “translated” more than the pages closer to the deformer:
There’s definitely more challenges to this, but I don’t see any point on trying to tackle these before I get the most basic and fundamental challenge in place.
So first off, have anyone of you rigged a book successfully? If so, what kind of approach did you have on the pages?
Second, what do you think of the bend-deformer approach? Is there any clever way to deal with the scaling-problem and the “resolution problem”?
Third, any hints/tips/general suggestions is greatly appreciated