Lava Flow

[flashmasterfong]

Is this for in game rendering, or is it going to be prerendered into a movie?

[mattmcdaid]

sorry, forgot to say that it will be required for in game rendering.

[TinyCerebellum]

The way this is normally done is by animating the texture placement coordinates through the UV space. The programmer would be taking care of this, in the game engine. Another method of animating this would be through palette cycling on the texture, but this is pretty old-school. I'm not entirely sure if it's still done by anyone :).

In Maya, what you can do to improve the look of the animation is to position the UVs in ways that speed up or slow down the animation on different parts of the lava mesh. While the programmer will give a global speed to the animation, you have to control this variance within the UVs. Basically, where you have UVs tighter in together, the texture will be moving faster, and where the UVs are farther apart, the texture will be moving slower.

[flashmasterfong]

Yea I would just go for the animated texture.

[mattmcdaid]

thankyou guys for your input on this one.

TinyCerebellum, thanks for your suggestion, i'll give your suggestion a try this evening.

thanks once again!

[newman]

What everyone told you is correct, I'd just like to add that animated UVW maps are most likely not supported by your engine/editor; when you'd try to import you'd get a static texture at best. So, either a programmer should take care of it, or you should make an animated texture - either way, you really need to consult the programmer/s on how to do this. I'm in this field too and I found that just doing things without consulting the programmers first often leads to having to do everything all over again :)

[mattmcdaid]

hi nighttrain, thanks for your response!

i am currently trying to achieve this lava flow effect by animating the UVs as oppose to using an animated texture map because you were correct in pointing out that our engine doesnt support animated textures, for the moment at least.

for now, i have split the lava geometry in to 3 layers. base layer is a yellow/orange gradient, middle layer consists of fiery red details (alpha) and the top layer is the molten crust with displacement (alpha also).

using TinyCerebellum's suggestion of 'tightning/relaxing' the UVs, these layers move at different speeds. this is a nice effect especially as i have setup a lava 'waterfall' that requires the lava to move faster as gravity takes a hold of it over the lip of the fall. very handy technique!

i am having some trouble still where the lava interacts with large rocks. i have slowed down the initial flow where the lava first hits a rock and then cut the mesh around the rock and pulled the verts so that the UVs hug the rock shape and that the lava flows smoothly around it in the correct fluid-like manor. the results are ok but i want something better. any suggestions guys?

[TinyCerebellum]

I'm glad you found my suggestions useful, matt. Also, I wholeheartedly agree with nighttrain about consulting with the programmer. It really is very important to be in constant communication with him.

Regarding improvements to your lava flow, some screenshots might give us a better idea to determine what could be improved.

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