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jussing
08-20-2006, 01:58 PM
Okidoki, here are a few tips to quickly making a stream of flowing lava. I hope somebody out there can use it.

Start by making a box like this. You will need to make it large enough to contain all the lava for the entire animation:

http://www.duck.dk/bin/lava_tut_01.png


Add a turbosmooth and some noise, for geometrical variation:

http://www.duck.dk/bin/lava_tut_02.png


Create an FFD box (as a seperate object, NOT as a modifier!) around part of the lava, like this, and bind the lava to the FFD with a spacewarp bind:

http://www.duck.dk/bin/lava_tut_03.png


Bend the lava into shape by moving the FFD box control points:

http://www.duck.dk/bin/lava_tut_04.png


Go to the final frame in the timeline, turn on ANIMATE, and move the lava through the FFD box:

http://www.duck.dk/bin/lava_tut_05.png


Voila, you're done! Play back the animation, and the lava is flowing.

Note that you will need to change the keyframe types to linear, if you want the lava's speed to be constant.

Also, as it appears in the picture above, as soon as the lava exits the FFD box, it will pop back to its unmodified position. You will need to take this into account. ;)

Cheers,
- Jonas
jussing
08-20-2006, 02:01 PM
As a final note I might add that as simple as this lava looks, you might just as well animate the UV's, instead of the geometry. But the idea of the method in the tutorial is if you have noise, rocks or lava bubbles, or other forms of surface variation, you can see the geometry is actually moving along like lava.

Cheers,
- Jonas
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