-- Metaballs-- Back to tutorial index

Overview: Metaballs, globby little things...they are fun to work with (if you have the patience) and can be quite usefull for simulating fluid, and organic shape. I will show you how metaballs work, and also explain the metaball tag, for negative influence metaballs.

NOTE: Metaballs can be used with both primitive shapes and splines.

Step 1: First make 2 spheres, make sure they are not close to one another.

Step 2: Now make your metaball object: OBJECTS > MODELING > METABALL or click here:

Step 3: Drag and Drop both of your spheres into the metaball object. You might notice that thier shape has changed a little, well if your just modeling with them leave them this way. You can smooth the metaballs but this does two things: 1. Is harder on system resources to move the objects and 2. Takes longer to render. So if your just modeling leave them in that funky shape for now, we will smooth them out alittle later.

Step 4: Now you will put them together, when they get close they start to attract to each other like this:

Step 5: Ok, you like that? Lets smooth them out a bit: Click on the metaball object and lower its "Editor Subdivision" I have lowered it to 10m (In XL7 double click the metaball object)

Thats how metaballs work in essence. You can also put splines in to the metaball objects as additional control objects. And you can also use negative metaballs which I will explain next.

Negative Metaballs Step 1: This is done with whats called a "Metaballs Tag" you access this by right clicking on an object. In the next example I have made another sphere and added it to the metaball object in the object manager.

Step 2: Next, right click on the object (in this case a sphere) you wish to be the negative influence. Next go to NEW TAG > METABALL TAG

Step 3: After you do that you have to click on the metaball tag that has now been attached to the object. This will give you a check box to make it negative as well as options for strength and radius.

I lowered my strength down to 50% and moved it on top of my right metaball.

And there is the outcome. Here is a little model I made with metaballs: Click here

Questions? Mail me.