how to animate human heart beat?

[lukx]

Does anyone have any tips how to rig human heart so it's expanding and shrinking (beating) ?
This kind of effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thwevf5v4BY

[joconnell]

Maybe this: http://www.visualart.be/?p=431

Or possibly a push modifier with soft selections and feed it into a noise modifier for the bits of wobble / distortion?

[super gnu]

with some careful work and soft selection, ffd, or as Joconnel said.. the push modifier. having recently played with inflated fabrics, i think youd have a hard time getting the control you need. now if you could map the elasticity with a map so it was more stretchy in certain areas...(maybe you can actually..hmmm. no.. no i dont think so.)

:P

[joconnell]

Yeah maybe some push mods and flex to add the little bit of "quiver" afterwards?

[Morbid Angel]

we recently did a heart beat shot for a film we are working on. What we ended up doing was closely studying the real heart beat and then adding controls for each of the areas of the heart to expand/contract. After that the animator was able to just replicate the heart beat and it worked quite well.

[Da_elf]

http://www.lumonix.net/skinfx.html

i can see this plugin doing that quite easily. without plugins i would use various forms of either morphing, push as some resommended set to soft selections or even smart use of bones might work.

[lukx]

I think the easiest way will be with morph targets.

[Alan Iglesias]

If the animation was simple enough and the heart was modeled with Sub-Ds I would animate the cage with x-form modifiers on selection sets of verts...kind of like modeling and animating at the same time...

-Alan