Within this post I have started to animate the AI sphere, here it is up right and out of the sand and hovering above it. Here the sphere pushes another smaller sphere out of it's self seamlessly, here I have used Metaball Mo-graph tag and connected the sphere and the small sphere as a child and once they touch the geometry of the shapes start to emerge together like a liquid, what the Metaball is used for normally. Once the sphere has touched the fall it begins to roll like a seed of a tree, to replicate the physics of a ball rolling Cinema 4D has Dynamic tags that can be applied to any 3D object. I have applied a Rigid Body Dynamic tag to the small sphere this creates its own physics and applies gravity to the object. Also by adding a Collider Body Dynamic tag to the sand object so the sphere can recognise the sand as a object to collide with, otherwise the sphere would pass though the sand object and out of scene.
I then took this one step further as I wanted to show that this a powerful and intelligent system that can manipulate the world around it self. As the sphere rolls the ground indents and follows the position of the sphere distorting the space around the sphere. Producing this I began by using a plain deformer and attached this as a child of the plane (sand) and then narrowed it down to a one point on the landscape using a field, this displaced the ground where the field was on the sand. To attach this to the same position of the ball rolling to create this displacement bump, I used the Tracer Mo-graph to the sphere this created a spline of the centre of sphere from the start to when the sphere stops. I then used this spline by adding an "Attach to spline" tag to the plain field and then key framing the positions as the sphere rolled. This also came in handy for the camera to follow the position of the sphere as it rolled, using the same "Attach to spline" tag on camera I can copy and paste the previous spline from the Tracer and rise it above the sphere, to capture a good angle. I then applied a "Target" tag to the camera and set the target to the sphere, so the camera would always be locked onto the sphere as it rolled.
Afterwards the sphere comes to a stop and becomes smaller as it was sinking or planting itself within the ground, where in this case the fungi that I have modelled and animated in a previous post grows from the where the sphere once was. these are seed from the larger AI sphere to create its very own utopia.
