CGTalk - texturing metaballs

amapimaster

07-08-2002, 06:45 PM

First of all, Hi

Just joined the forum after managing to convince company i work for to get me this fine piece of software!

using it for exhibition stands/architectural stuff, well - i will be soon! Anybody else here using it for this sort of thing? Im Mac based if anyones wondering

Anyway, as a little side job I want to make an animated logo. Im familiar with the basic animation side from my use of version 5, but im unsure how to achieve the effect i want.

Basically I want to use metaball spheres, 6 in total that come together to form one larger blob. I know how to do that, the problem is i want a different company logo on each blob. As the blobs come together the logos
vanish and a "company group" logo appears on the larger blob to represent the companys working as a group.

i have tried texturing the metaballs, but i can only texture the parent object. not the individual balls. The manual mentions the texture stick tag - but i havent had much luck with that!

Any ideas?

Grey

07-08-2002, 07:00 PM

I see the problem... and I don't have a solution to do exactly what you're trying to do, I can't seem to get the sticky tag to work either...

But have you thought about using flat mapping projecting the six logos into space where a metaball sits to receive each, the move them into the center where the new logo is projected? Not a perfect solution, I'm sure...

But the other solution would be to make models of all six then have them merge into the new shape...

amapimaster

07-08-2002, 07:19 PM

thanks,

Thats a good idea!

Have to try it tomorrow, c4d`s at work.

Cheers

Grey

07-08-2002, 07:22 PM

I hope you're correct that it's a good idea...

I'm already seeing inhearant problems with it...

I'm using XL6.3, so perhaps you have features I don't have for that... :D

good luck!

LucentDreams

07-09-2002, 05:58 AM

hmm just on thiking of this myself, it seams that grey's idea would be best, though still quite hard to do. I'll let youn know if I come up with anything better but I don't have time to really play around so anysuggestion I make would be theoretical.

JINN

07-09-2002, 11:15 AM

Is it possible to bake the animation so that they become polys or something?

Or perhaps use a texture track or something?

LucentDreams

07-09-2002, 11:29 AM

what you can do is once your animation is done, go to the key points ans do current state to object. the do a PLA morph animation. this may not work with the fact thtat there are seperate blobs initially.

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