Hi everyone,
I have been stuck on this issue for a while now, I’m trying to find the best way to replicate the beautiful colour-changing skin of the cuttlefish. Here is a link of the colour-change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5CZ74ybnbE (start at 1:04).
I want to replicate this kind of pulsing effect over the body, I’m using MAYA for my 3D software. I have managed to get some sort of effect on a simple fish model using an alpha image sequence which I made in Aftereffects, and then plugged it into a material and blended it over the fish material. The problem with this method is that the alpha image sequence I made fits over the UV’s in a specific way, so the sequence is very dependent on my UV layout. If I were to model a cuttlefish with UVs on several different tiles, and have the cuttlefish rotating and moving, I would be very limited with how I can use my animated alphas. I spoke to an industry professional about my issue and he suggested I use scripting, weight maps, and ramps (to parametrize the weight maps) to achieve the similar pulse effect. This stuff went over my head a bit,
I was wondering if anyone here could help unpick what this guy meant, or offer me any other advise as to how I might achieve this effect.
Many thanks in advance 