Larva lamp

[ewerybody]

dunno.. Any kind of fluid package? eg Maya Fluids.. or Metaballs

[Ls3D]

I saw Larva lamp & thought I was about to see a cool yet gross animation.. Are you from Boston?..

Seems to me an observant animator could just use basic deformation tools and geometry to do a Lava Lamp. Yeah meta-surfaces would take it up a notch, and maybe there are some fluid sims that would add realism, but after you have messed with em for how long?

I guess it depends on how close the camera is and what the design requires, I made a watch drip pretty good without plug-ins or dynamics. Just Max's FFD and some observations of nature and patient keyframe and edit cycles.

-S

[olli96]

If you are using 3dsmax, get Pete Drapers Book "Deconstructing the Elements" - one of the best max book out there. He covers a Lava Lamp (Gallery (http://www.xenomorphic.co.uk/gallery_dte.htm)) in his book too. Basicly he is using pFlow and blobmesh to create this kind of effect.

Olli

[Nicool]

Otherwise, I don't know from what distance your lava lamp is gonna be shown, but I would simply do it with simple animated noisy procedural textures. As you may know, random based procedural textural are (on most of packages) animatable. So, with a simple shading network you would get a blobby colored mass moving.

Since lava lamp liquid is not taht much shaded, you would have quite a good result yet. If you want to have it shaded, you could fake it through using shading network trips (such as using the current animated texture as a bump map or kind of normal map)

*Nico

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