Hi there, this is my first post here and I was in a dilemma over where to post this, in texturing or animation subforums, but since this is my first post here and will pass through validation anyway I hope it will be moved to the appropriate section if I didn’t pick the right one.
I want to make a 3d animated cake in the process of baking, where the baking soda expands the cake, causing the initial baked crust to break with new crust forming from the dough inside, with the initial crust remaining darker than the newly formed crust. An actual image sample:
[http://www.thefreshloaf.com/files/u5405/sourdough%20w%3Acracked%20wheat.jpg](http://www.thefreshloaf.com/files/u5405/sourdough%20w%3Acracked%20wheat.jpg)
I need to achieve a similar effect starting with smooth surface dough, with an expanding mesh and texture animation, a sort of a timelapse of an actual cake baking
I have no problems animating the mesh itself, but I struggle with the animation of the texture to achieve that effect. It is kind of hard explaining what I exactly want to achieve, since I had problems even finding an example of that, maybe the closest thing to the effect I want to achieve is in a crazy video, the author of which despite my inquiry did not shed any light on, probably because he is Neil Adams, a creator of many famous comic books, and he didn't do it himself, most probably some of his cg artists. Here is the actual video, note the morphing of the texture towards a perfect fit on a smaller mesh specifically between 6.24 and 8:05 but also on many places throughout the video :
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJfBSc6e7QQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJfBSc6e7QQ)
I figured out I should start with the end result - making a cracked texture which morphs to the initial clean texture and then reverse that to get the effect I need. The initial step - the end result is easy, but I hit a brick wall with trying to animate that so it looks natural, organic and convincing.
I have tried achieving this effect with UV animation but found it to be a dead end, my next idea was to use an animated texture I morphed the darker crust join together to the initial state in After Effects but that seems to introduce too much distortion, even thou it works much better than animating the UVs.
Oddly enough, that effect is achieved very well on the video reference I posted, so I will be very grateful if someone could share the workflow I need to follow, I am fairly experienced in both 2d and 3d so no detailed explanation is needed, just a rough explanation of the best approach to achieve this effect.
10x in advance