More Tutorials
by Rodrigo Duarte: - How To Create Basic Metallic Textures
- An Introduction To Glass
- Gems 101
by Rodrigo Duarte: - How To Create Basic Metallic Textures
- An Introduction To Glass
- Gems 101
Lighting a Fuse (Fountain FX IV)
We’ll light a fuse using fountains for the sparks and smoke. Of course there are more things to solve here: the gradual disappearance of the fuse and the light emitted by the burning fuse.
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fuse disappears fine except the very beginning of fuse does not disappear, am I missing something ?
Hi, The very beginning is the “cap” of the fuse or is there more that remains visible?
it looks like just the very beginning after some slight texture position adjustments is there any way to make that disappear, my camera view shows all of my fuse, I see now that in your movie the beginning of the fuse is not showing is that why ?
My camera view hides it. It is a little geometry showing close to the cap.
Change the mapping size to 110% in the x-axis and then back to 100% at time=0 and it should work. At least it just worked here.
Why would this tutorial assume you know how to animate a stencil map? There are ZERO tutorials out here that shows how to do that…. Im not a big fan of using just text and images for “How to” videos, and this is a clear example of why.
You can download the animated stencil map here. Thanks for pointing out the potential difficulty!
Thanks for the prompt response! I didn’t want to use the downloaded file, because I’m trying to animate coffee flowing throw a tube, so instead of white, I needed brown AND instead of making the stencil map disappear, I wan’t it to appear. I figured out how to create the animation, which is easy enough. The problem I have now is getting the stencil map to flow in the right direction, but it flows from random points. I want to create an effect that shows the coffee flowing from one point of the tube to the other. Is this even possible or am I wasting my time?
Coffee flowing through a tube. Interesting!
The random flowing may be because of the mapping. How are you mapping the “flowing texture”? UV mapping?
As to the color of the texture, you can use the stencil map on a texture that’s any color you like. Stencil only controls the visibility.
How complex is the tube?
The tube is pretty simple. Not quite a straight tube, but nearly. I tried UV mapping, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t figure out how to position the maps, because I was unable to find the dialog box.
Is it possible to control the timing of the stencil map? So, if I wanted it to start 30 seconds into my animation, how would I do that?
I don’t have an answer for that. Let me do some research 🙂
never mind, I figured it out.
Good! ¿How did you solve it?
I have coffee flowing on the tube, but no delay yet.
It’s rigged, but works. Create three textures, the first one is just a plain coffee color texture, the second is a white or light gray texture with 70% transparency, and the third is the stencil map of the coffee flowing into scene. Make sure the RBG for the stencil map and plain coffee texture are the same. Now go edit the image texture for the stencil map. Click on the box to the left of “Diffuse Color”. An edit dialog box should appear and change the Playback from “Once” to “Loop”. Next, create an extruded cylinder. Add the transparent texture to that cylinder or what I’m going to call it ‘tube’. Copy and paste the tube and remove the texture from the pasted tube. Scale it down to fit inside of the original tube. Do some modifying to ensure both are the same length. The inner tube will need two textures, which are the plain coffee texture and the stencil map. At the beginning of the timeline, edit both textures on the inner tube by setting the Stencil to 0%. While doing this, make sure the “Stencil Reveals Default” is set to Invisible. Now the next part is timing. Anchor the starting keyframes on the timeline to 10 seconds. 10 seconds exact might not work though. The key is to know when the stencil map will loop next so we can get the effect of coffee flowing from the beginning of the tube to the other end. So anchor the starting keyframes to the point of which the inner tube has zero color animating into it from the stencil map. Once you get to this point, move the timeline head 0.01 seconds in front of the starting anchor keyframe. Ensure Automatic keyframing is enabled, and go ahead and edit the stencil map texture for the inner tube by setting the stencil to 100%. Now scroll the timeline head to the point where the stencil map fills the inner tube with coffee color and add another keyframe. Again, move the timeline head 0.01 seconds in front of the new keyframe and edit the stencil map once more by making the stencil 0%. The point of which the stencil is set to 0% for the stencil map is where you will add a keyframe fo the plain coffee texture. Move the timeline head 0.01 seconds in front of that keyframe and edit the stencil to 100% for the plain coffee texture. The reason for the plain coffee texture is to keep the tube filled with coffee, since the stencil map loops and will never hold the position to give the appearance that the tube is filled. This is probably really confusing, since it’s all text, but If you would like me to share the file of the animation, I would be happy to do so.
Looks daunting when written!
I understand the procedure, was similar to some thoughts I had… but here should be something simpler…
Perhaps you could post the animation to Stratacafe.com?