How to animate lasers melting and ice block

[charleslin]

I suppose there are quite a few many ways to tackle this.
If it were me tacking this shot, and I were using maya...

I would take a cube and a sphere, set nCloth to it (no gravity) and use the sphere as the deformer for the cube (making the sphere invisible) keyframe the sphere to animate the pattern for the path of the laser.

To do the laser, I would create a thin cyninder make it the solid color of the laser via a surface shader and then put an aim constraint pointing to the invisible sphere so therever the sphere goes it would "point there."

With the initial deformations in place, cheat the rest by lattice deform keyframes to slowly make the cube smaller and smaller little secotions at a time, and then finally overall scaling the geometry to zero.

Then comp the laser to look like a laser in post and comp the vehicle into the shot to make the transformation.

I'm sure there are many other ways to takle the shot and the original artist might have done it a different way, but that's how I would approach the shot. I guess the key factor to this approach would be the ncloth settings to use.

[T3TSUO]

Thanks for the new perspective charleslin.

After reading your post,
I have been experimenting with nCloth for this project and am having a little trouble locking down the best settings for the ncloth material.

a lot of times the collision sphere will push into the cube nicely, but then dig in too deep and have the cloth overlap itself. other times the the sphere will start to push the whole cube.

I do not have a ton of experience with nCloth. any help with the initial settings would be greatly appreciated.

THANK YOU!

[charleslin]

Ok here is something I whipped up very quickly.
http://www.animationspot.net/videos/WIP/forums/nClothHelp.mov

Things to note:
- The cluster is for the verts at the end of the cylinder. That cluster is then transform constrained to the sphere. Thus where the sphere goes, the tip of the cylinder will follow.
- The spheres at the corners of the cube you can hide. They serve as anchor points to nconstrain the corners of the cube. I used transform nconstrain vert-to-vert, and set the channel box settings of the sonstraint to "weld." This will pin the cube in place and keep it from floating about.
- The cube is set to use the ncloth preset of "putty" in the attribute editor presets for the ncloth Shape node.
- While you're in the attribute editor, you might want to go ahead and pop over to the nucleus tab, and disable gravity (or leave it on, if you need gravity for your transformation; to turn it on or off at a specific frame, you'll need to script that in, as I dunn think you can keyframe that)
- Enable ground plane collision if you need it to collide with the x,z ground axies.
- To prevent it from folding in on itself, self collide should be set to "on" from the putty preset, but you want to make sure the cube has enough geometry for the deformation.

Now you should be able to key frame the tiny sphere along the surface of the cube and it should work. All you would then need to do is fine-tune it to fit how you want it to behave.

Lemme know how this works out.

[ydiaz]

Hey, sorry to jump in but I came up with a different solution in case you want to try it, here's a quick vid of the result:

http://ymasd.com/tmp/laser_ice_cube.mov

- Basically you create a cube, subdivide it a few times and create a soft body out of it, a simple soft body, no copy or goals in the option box.
- Set the conserve values for the particles to less than 1 to keep them fairly still
- Then create a radial field with a small spherical volume shape and a fairly large magnitude, depending on the scale of your scene, and some attenuation.
- I added a gravity field to simulate the ice melting, also with a spherical volume shape only slightly larger.
- Create a locator and parent both fields to it and animate it so they're close to the surface, but not touching as you might get particles moving away from the center of the cube.

You will probably have to tweak the conserve, magnitude and attenuations a bit to get the look you want but I thought it might be easier this way.

Good luck!
Y.

P.S. This topic might be better suited for the Dynamics forum.

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