Fracking Tower

[jaunty relic]

I would rather have the tube on the left stretch its segments as if it's actually connected to the plunger, instead of magicking more out of thin air. if you know how to do this pls tell me

[main meadow]

you could use a curve deform and stretch an array of the tube rings to the length you need, though idk if it would look physically accurate. maybe there's a way to draw a curve along an ik chain...

[jaunty relic]

That's what I'm currently doing, but it won't stretch the segments, it just stops placing them

This might require geometry nodes

[main meadow]

you could have an animated offset for a set number of outer rings and a flexible core! but that might require hand keying the offsets or fancy driver math

actually, the curve you have already seems to be moving, so could you keyframe a simple deform-stretch?

sorry if this isn't useful, don't have enough info about what you're already doing at a glance and am researching how to do it myself

[main meadow]

here's a shape-keyed curve, and a cube with these modifiers

the bone isn't doing anything except help alignment for a snap to vertex edit. the stretch can probably be hand crafted to fit perfectly, but i didn't have the patience for the effort

[jaunty relic]

yeah that's exactly what i want! i'll try it later

[jaunty relic]

What is the stretch doing there?

i cant' replicate

Oh i see you keyframed the stretch

[main meadow]

Yep!

[jaunty relic]

clever

[main meadow]

My first suggestion was about animating the relative offset between the array elements, though that would break merging between them