Jefferson Smith writes:
Most solutions I've seen for making a guitar string vibrate are more compute-intensive than I'd like. Especially when I'm working in a fairly simple, cartoonish format and need to push out 3-5 new comedy videos per week. So when I came up with a new gag that would require my caveman Muppet to sing and play guitar, I needed a solution that I could control easily and that wouldn't take a week to render on my ancient hardware.
What I came up with won't win any prizes for photorealism, but it renders quickly, works in both Cycles and Evee, and is convincing enough for my needs. Plus it's easy to control for things like timing, attack and sustain. In the linked article, I explain the material node network that makes it work (yes, it's all done with materials) and provide some hints for how it could be improved even further, if anyone needs to turn the amp up to 11.
