Is it possible to animate flexible ropes with Smart Magnet Rigs?

Question

What it says in the title. Could I potentially create a graphic, or a series of graphics, for a rope, and perform "proportional deformations" on them to create a rope bending in a natural way?

Answer 1

No.
Smart Magnet Rigs are designed for cutout character animation and at this stage do not offer deformers.

Comments

Thanks! Thought so.

Another question: what if I make the rope in question segmented -- would it be possible to make children joints rotate both with and further along with the parent joint? In other words, rotating joint 1 will rotate joint 2 by +5 degrees, joint 3 by +10 degrees and so on.

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Yes, that multi-joint setup will work, but it will be rather painful to 'pose' like that, one element at a time.
It will quickly drive you crazy, I imagine. You can try, though.

In Animate you can create a custom brush, which will be a stroke that you can shape tween.
Unfortunately in Flash you can't do that.

Here is a link to Pink & Aint's plugin page: https://blog.pinkandaint.com/flash-tools/
Try to install the Art Brush plugin and see if it can help you with your task.
(I must have tried it many years ago, but really don't remember anything about it.)
It may be possible to shape tween a line, convert to frame-by-frame and then apply this 'Art Brush' to it, to make it look like a rope.

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I tried it out and I can't seem to get the desired result.

What about my earlier suggestion: is it possible to program an SMR chain that progressively rotates child symbols more than the parent (i. e. rotating the parent joint of the rope will make the entire rope curl into that direction)?

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Sorry! I did not understand your earlier post correctly. Now I do.
You can't 'program' SMR with progressive actions like that.