animating veins!

[dirkusrhombas]

First of all please be more specific as im not sure whether u want to animate veins pumping on geometry or a scientific type 3d scene where there are blood cells moving through veins ect ect SPECEFICS !!!! :P

Anyway heres a way to animate veins over geometry.

I can give u a hint on what to do but its fairly complex ... here goes .... you can animate a bump map along a surface by using a layered texture and a sequence of images.

What you would need is some 2d animation software like flash which you can use to do a animated texture of the veins moving upwards from the bottom of the page to the top . Then you take that sequence and plug them in as a bump map in maya.

(There are other ways to plug in the bump sequence in the hypershade) (this is just one of em)) You would then plug this sequence of images into your layered shader and viola u have animated veins.

I hope im getting extra browney points for this .

[TheWraith]

dirk's suggestion looks pretty dead on for the best way i can think of. only thing i would say is to maybe use displacement mapping rather than bump.

[trthing]

In Alias website. Not sure if it is only for e-support members though...

[clarix]

Originally posted by clarix
hi guys,

how would you animate veins???? I do not want to create 2000 curves and then animate the extrusion and I am nt that familiar with painteffects. So is there any other way to do it simpler??

Thanks in advance!


hi dirkusrhombas,
I am talking abt a 3d scene. I want the veins to grow from the brain to the bottom of the model and since I have to start with a close shot of the brain I could not fake it with some 2d effects.

cheers:beer:

[dirkusrhombas]

Do you want something like out of Hollowman ?

[clarix]

Originally posted by clarix
hi dirkusrhombas,
I am talking abt a 3d scene. I want the veins to grow from the brain to the bottom of the model and since I have to start with a close shot of the brain I could not fake it with some 2d effects.

cheers:beer:


yea I guess something like that would work!

[BigSky]

Hey Fella,

don't be shy of paint effects...it's your easiest option here. You can even convert to polys for a MR render, so you don't even have that excuse:

Vitals:

Make your curves brain...head...your cv count will influence the draw of the strokes, so make a few test resolutions.

You can then get your settings from the selected stroke (I suggest intestinal flow from the fun mesh in Maya5, in the visor)

Then, you choose PFX>curves>attach brush to curves (on all your curves if you want a similar look, or a few, whatever..)

Then you choose all of the created strokes and you can use "share one brush" if you have an unmanagable mess of viens.

To animate is easy...you can add some dynamics in the behaviour tab under the tubes tab.

You can animate the growth of the thing along the tube by selecting the shape node of the thing and animating END BOUNDS min>max.

If you use the brush I have suggested you may want to turn off texture flow under flow animation.

Hope this helps. Once you have set this up, it's pretty easy to make some changes across your strokes (hue rand, etc, min, max tube size, displacement mesh, etc thru mel. You may not even have to do this, though!

[dirkusrhombas]

If you end up doing something different than whats been suggested so far id love to hear about it :)

[orgeeizm]

hmm. I wonder if any of the people who worked at Hollowman goes in this forum. Maybe they can give us tips how they made those animation when the guy injected the chemical stuff on the gorilla and the veins started to show animated and all.

[BigSky]

orgeeizm

Most of the stuff for HollowMan was done in PRMan with procedurals. I saw a presentation on it by Ken (uhh, forgot) from Sony Pictures at siggraph 2002. Here's a link to some stuff:
http://www.imageworks.com/films/hollowman/index.html

I remember there was a lot of matte painting involved.

[clarix]

thank u all!

cheers:beer:

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.