question about sand

[jelloshotsrule]

i thought about using an object as a deformer and having it affect the ground plane (ie, the object diving into the sand would deform it) but i'm not sure that would give the exact effect i want...

hm

[luminis]

It's not terribly hard to do these things if you know how to use the correct tools and have lots and lots of time to tweak all the settings until it looks good enough.

1.) To create the footstep, you can use blendshapes. Create the normal sea floor, but then duplicate it several times, in each duplicate adding a new footstep (you can sculpt it with artisan, or just pull CV's to give it the shape needed). Then set all these duplicates as in-between targets, and animate the final blendshape control.

To add the particles that are blown when the foot hits the floor, just create a particle emitter where the foot touches the floor, and set it to emit a certain number of particles only during that time.

2.a.) This one shouldn't be so hard either. Using particles emitting from, say, the head of the character, and set them to collide with the character (so that they slide around it, instead of falling through it), and perhaps also bulging somewhat the surface from which he is coming out from, so that it looks like sand builds up around him as he surfaces.

2.b.) This one would be a bit more challenging to do, but it could be done by modifying the things in 2.a.

Fluids are nice, but they won't work as well as particles will.

I'm not sure how experienced you are with maya, so the explanations above are assuming you know how to set those things up. If you are not sure about how to use any of the things I described, then don't hesitate to say so, and I'll show you how to set each part up.

Let me know if you need more help, I'd be glad to help you out :)

[jelloshotsrule]

thanks, you pretty much suggested what i figured would be the case.

i know maya pretty well and am familiar with everything you suggested, so i'll definitely give those a try.

main reason i asked about fluids is because my teacher is an alias/wavefront trainer and he suggested fluids, however he didn't have time to explain how to utilize them in my case, and wont't be back for a few weeks. so i just wanted to try to figure it out somewhat in the mean time...

so the only thing i'll ask then is as for the part of him coming out or going into the sand... is there a way to make a piece of geometry soft and globby so that it looks like a bunch of sand sliding down, rather than just a piece of the floor plane? i don't know anything about soft bodies, but i would have thought that could be utilized for that effect? but i couldn't really get any good effects out of soft bodies in the time i took to mess around with them

as for the particles, i assume it's fairly easy to tweak them and get them to look "sandlike"? i know how particles work (emitters and such), just never had the use for them in a project. so i haven't experimented with them much. and unfortunately, my experimentation time for the sand effects is limited, as i have to do the actual animating and am coming up on the end of the project... ha. i'm sure you know how it is

thanks for your time

[luminis]

Sorry for the delay in replying, this thread got bumped back by all other new posts.

Anyway... I now see why fluids was suggested to you. Soft bodies would be fine, but to create "soft and globby" geometry sliding down, fluids would give a better look. However, using either soft bodies or fluids, would require a large amount of time for tweaking in order to get a decent result (especially since they behave differently under different scenarios), and if you're not too familiar with them yet, and don't have the time anymore to do this, I would suggest you only go with sand particles falling down and bulging of the sand plane, as I suggested before.

Getting particles to look like sand wouldn't require much effort. If you have already worked with particle dynamics in the past, then that is a big advantage. The only thing you would need to do is to tweak color PP (per particle) attributes, perhaps some transparency as well, and the dynamics of the particle movement. Give it a try, and if it doesn't give you good results, let me know, I might be able to help you in that part.

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