Moho Forum

On the animation I just did I was really looking for displacement mapping, like that found in 3D apps, and animated fills, moving textures inside shapes.

I was doing a diagram with arrows and lots of text. I realized Anime Studio was probably not the best decision for this type of work.

I wanted to create a wave motion in a symbol for a liquid, so that the waves move through the object horizontally. Is there a way to do this without displacement mapping?

The other thing I needed to depict was water flowing through pipes. In the past I've used color cycling for this type of thing, or moving a texture through an object. I had to resort to creating a second object and using masking to make it show only inside the pipe. Is there a better way?

Thanks,
Don

SpaceBoy64 wrote:I wanted to create a wave motion in a symbol for a liquid, so that the waves move through the object horizontally. Is there a way to do this without displacement mapping?

You could try an idea which Selgin used originally for a snake, I think, and that is dragging an image across a mesh of bones (kind of like dragging a flag over a ploughed field).

SpaceBoy64 wrote:The other thing I needed to depict was water flowing through pipes. In the past I've used color cycling for this type of thing, or moving a texture through an object. I had to resort to creating a second object and using masking to make it show only inside the pipe. Is there a better way?

I haven't had a look for them recently, but there used to be a gallery ofanimated diagrams showing AS's capabilities -- one showed blood circulation through the heart using particles. Is that what you mean?

jahnocli wrote:

SpaceBoy64 wrote:I wanted to create a wave motion in a symbol for a liquid, so that the waves move through the object horizontally. Is there a way to do this without displacement mapping?

You could try an idea which Selgin used originally for a snake, I think, and that is dragging an image across a mesh of bones (kind of like dragging a flag over a ploughed field).

I use this technique ALL the time, right now I'm working in a project which included a very complex scene with smoke moving and being transformed on animals. It just works perfect for several tasks. I want to share some new files soon, meanwhile, you can see the technique here
viewtopic.php?t=13230

Thanks. I have actually used a similar technique before in Lightwave 3D and I thought about doing something like this, but for some reason I was thinking that the bones always remained connected to their vector layers, so I didn't even try it.

Can the vector layer remain stationary and the bones move instead? I read that thread where people mentioned doing that, but couldn't find an example.

As for the animated fill, the way I did it, using masking, works well enough, but having the ability to move a texture through an object via the fill menu would greatly simplify things. Procedural textures would be great here. The older version of AS had something called "noise" I think. I thought that was great, but version 6 doesn't have it. That was a procedural texture. I use Lightwave 3D and I use it's procedural textures quite a bit. This would add a lot to Anime Studio. I can see using them for shading, making things look bumpy, adding texture without having to create bit maps in another program.

Thanks.
-Don