Linds
10-27-2005, 11:04 PM
(Also posted on Postforum)
Here’s a nuggety little problem that’s been keeping me awake nights... I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions.
I’ve been asked by a client to create an animation as follows:
Imagine an amorphous blob kind of like what yo get in a 70s lava lamp. For the sake of argument, lets say it’s yellow. Now, also floating around are several simple shapes, say a cone, a pyramid, a cube and a sphere each a different color.
now imagine the blob attracts and absorbs the cube so that as it approaches the surface of the blob, the cube becomes less cubic and more blobby, while at the same time the colour of the cube, say blue, is absorbed into the blob which becomes green, sort of like mixing paint.
So colored shapes become absorbed into the blob like mercury, and in reverse, the blob spawns other primitive colored shapes each time their colours and shapes mixing and merging.
It’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s for a logo sequence for a product where the customer can mix and match components to tailor a custom solution.
So can anyone think how this might be possible. My first thought was naturally Mettaballs, but I immediately ran into a couple of problems. Firstly using anything other than spheres under a Mettaball object seems to create “lumpy” geometry, and secondly, it doesn’t seem possible to use multiple materials inside a Metaballs object.
I’ve also played around with Boolean objects inside HyperNurbs without much success, animating the objects being booled seems to cause the HN smoothing to jump and jitter around.
Then there’s the small matter of the material colors. I’ve experimented with proximal, but can’t get it to mix colors together so I’m guessing this will have to be done with expresso.
So all in all, I’ve failed miserably. Any lateral thinkers and/or technical geniuses out there have any bright ideas I’d be eternally grateful.
Thanks all
Linds Redding
Dept. of Motion Graphics
C4D 9.101 Mac OSX 10.3.9[I][B]
Here’s a nuggety little problem that’s been keeping me awake nights... I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions.
I’ve been asked by a client to create an animation as follows:
Imagine an amorphous blob kind of like what yo get in a 70s lava lamp. For the sake of argument, lets say it’s yellow. Now, also floating around are several simple shapes, say a cone, a pyramid, a cube and a sphere each a different color.
now imagine the blob attracts and absorbs the cube so that as it approaches the surface of the blob, the cube becomes less cubic and more blobby, while at the same time the colour of the cube, say blue, is absorbed into the blob which becomes green, sort of like mixing paint.
So colored shapes become absorbed into the blob like mercury, and in reverse, the blob spawns other primitive colored shapes each time their colours and shapes mixing and merging.
It’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s for a logo sequence for a product where the customer can mix and match components to tailor a custom solution.
So can anyone think how this might be possible. My first thought was naturally Mettaballs, but I immediately ran into a couple of problems. Firstly using anything other than spheres under a Mettaball object seems to create “lumpy” geometry, and secondly, it doesn’t seem possible to use multiple materials inside a Metaballs object.
I’ve also played around with Boolean objects inside HyperNurbs without much success, animating the objects being booled seems to cause the HN smoothing to jump and jitter around.
Then there’s the small matter of the material colors. I’ve experimented with proximal, but can’t get it to mix colors together so I’m guessing this will have to be done with expresso.
So all in all, I’ve failed miserably. Any lateral thinkers and/or technical geniuses out there have any bright ideas I’d be eternally grateful.
Thanks all
Linds Redding
Dept. of Motion Graphics
C4D 9.101 Mac OSX 10.3.9[I][B]