8

680 Chapter 8: Modifiers
Control Points group
Reset—Returns all control points to their orig inal
positions.
Animate All—By default, the control points of an
FFD lattice don’t appear in Track V iew because
they don’t have controllers assigned to them. But
whenyouanimateacontrolpoint,acontrolleris
assigned and it b ecomes visible in Track View. You
can a lso add and delete keys and perform other key
operations. Animate All assigns Point3 controllers
to al l control points so that they’re immediately
visible in Track View.
Confor m to S hape—Moves each FFD control point
to the intersection of the modified object with a
straight line extending between the object’s center
to the control point’s original location, plus an
offset distance specified by the O ffset spinner.
Note: Conform to Shape works best with regular
shapes, such as primitives. It’s less effect ive if
the object has degenerate (long, narrow) faces or
sharp corners. All the controls are unavailable
w ith shapes, bec ause there are no faces for the
lattice to intersect with.
Inside Points—Only control points inside the object
are affected by Conform to Shape.
Outs id e Po int s—Only control points outside the
object are affected by Conform to Shape.
Offset—The distance by which control points
affected by Conform to Shape are offset from the
object surface.
About—Displays a dialog with copyright and
licensing information.
FFD (Free-Form Deformation)
Select Modifier
Select an FFD space warp. > Modify panel > Mo d ifie r List
> FFD Selec t
Select an FFD space warp. > Modifiers menu > Selection
Modifiers > FFD Select
The FFD Select modifier works on an FFD (Box )
Space Warp (page 2–87)
or FFD (Cyl) Space Warp
(page 2–91)
to change the selection of its control
points, and pass the s election up the s tack.
The space-warp versions of the FFD modifiers
provide sub-object geometry that you can
manipulate in the stack. For example, you can
apply a
Bend mo difier (page 1–541) to an FFD
space warp, b end its control points, and thus bend
the object to which the space warp is bound.
Using the FFD Select modifier, you can select a
sub-object pattern of control poin ts, and then use
the subsequent modifier(s) to deform the selec ted
points.
The FFD Select modifier is especially useful for
assigning
Linked XForm modifiers (page 1–703)
to por t ions of an FFD space warp.
Procedure
Example: To use the Link ed XForm modifier with a n
FFD s pace war p:
1.
Create an object, an FFD space warp (such
as
FFD (B ox) (page 2–87) ), and a couple of
dummies (page 2–15) .
2. Bind the FFD space warp to the object you want
to deform.
3. Select the FFD space warp and apply an FFD
Select modifier.
4. In the Control Points sub-object mode, selec t
the control points you want to use to affect the
object.