I’m using Toon Boom Premium. I’m trying to animate water moving through a hose in the motion of a sine wave, like so: https://youtu.be/qNf9nzvnd1k?t=16
I saw the Deformation Wave effect in the Node Library and figured this would be the perfect fit for the job. I watched a tutorial that included some material on it ( https://youtu.be/wPDzsUpkn8U?list=PLC43A046ED952EC41&t=2626 ) but it cut it short.
So I added a Curve to my hose (which is just a drawing of a straight green line). I’ve found that when I apply the deformation wave, it does the wave effect on the hose, but it doesn’t allow you to animate it smoothly. In other words, if I drag the Curve I have, it simply stretches that Sine Wave rather than creating another one behind it so that you can animate a perfect looping sine wave. If that makes sense.
Can what I want be achieved easily using the Deformation Wave effect or should I just do this traditionally?
Not sure if I understand correctly but all I can say is, you can squash and stretch the curvy lines in different timing like a spring. This also applies the same for deformation with one long bone structure from one end to the other end. The only challenge is swapping the drawing to straight line when it needs to be flat line. Then you do not need to worry about the loop. The only thing you might have a drawback in result, when long lines are squashed, the curvy edge of the line (pick) becomes thicker and center of the line (close to 0 Y-axis) becomes thinner. I think this might be the limitation of the method using deform or transform tool. But if you think the result is good, then this would be the simplest way,
Other possible method is using some expression and particles since it does not have to be a line to simulate the result as long as the illusion for the eyes works in result. This however requires some more depth of understanding Expression and particles. To make long story short, draw a dot and use expression to sinus the movement and use particle and function to play with the movement and timing. This however requires a lot of adjustment but once it is done, it can be applied on many different ways. Here is the example in Harmony 12.2 that it was for some simple test and far from perfect. But you can play with it and change the value to make it what you are looking for. Also you can share with others. Also if you want to show two lines other than one as if high frequency, you can create another ‘particle-visualizer’ by unchecking ‘scale particle system using parent peg’ in the option and instead, add another peg and offset the position of the result outside of camera and put it back to camera when it requires two lines.