Soft body procedural animation

Published: 09 March 2025
on channel: argonaut

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I’m back with another procedural animation technique for you! Although it’s not as simple as the last one, I promise it’s just as ribbiting... 🐸

This video is a tutorial/explanation for an interesting procedural animation technique that I haven’t seen much online (though I’m sure someone has done it before!). It involves rigging a character to a volume preserving soft body to get a cool deformable effect. In the video, I explain how to create the soft body from scratch and then use it to animate a squishy frog.

⚙️ Source code
Simulations written in Java using Processing.
https://github.com/argonautcode/soft-...

A few of the LaTeX animations in this video were made with Motion Canvas. Everything else is my own very messy work in Processing.

📝 Resources
Learn about constraints:
https://zalo.github.io/blog/constraints/

Learn about splines and curves:
   • The Beauty of Bézier Curves
   • The Continuity of Splines

👥 Socials
Twitter:   / argonautcode

📗 Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:25 Euler Method
01:32 Distance Constraint
03:05 Verlet Integration
04:43 Trapezoid Formula
06:04 Dilation
07:10 Soft Body Blob
08:14 Frog Body & Face
09:05 Frog Legs
10:38 Frog Demo

🎵 Music
Castles in the Sky - Scott Buckley
Adrift Among Infinite Stars - Scott Buckley