Growing a vine or spline?

cobusp

I saw on an old thread (can't remember which one) about simulating growing vegetation and there was one particular sample of a growing vine (which impressed me). Is this done in the spline modeler?

I have a logo with a large swipe (see image) that I want to animate to start "growing" into existence from one end to the other.

I After-Effects it would be simple -- just move a mask over the image to reveal more of it.

But in 3D, can such a thing be accomplished without humongous effort?

wetcircuit

I have an idea this *should* be animation along a path... but I don't know how that would work in Carrara. You are pretty clever with experimenting, so I wouldn't presume to make suggestions after a minute of thinking (compared to you probably thinking about it for some time)...

I would probably export the sweep shape in a vector format from my graphics program (AI or whatever) then try some shader reveal methods - If you have DCG's Enhance:C plugin it has a geometric shader that is "radial" but sweeps like a clockface I think Veloute might also have one.... I tried to think whether a similar-use shader would be included, but not sure...

DUDU

If is to use a simple mask, you can do it also directly in Carrara.
You could also use a spot which discovers your logo gradually, or you work the transparencies in shaders, or…
There are several manners of arriving there according to your final goal.
For animations of vine, if it would be me, I will test initially the metabals but if you have AE, you can create a footage with an animated brush on transparent layer which you load in your shaders.
I often use this technique in displacement maps…

cobusp

DUDU_00001 said:

If is to use a simple mask, you can do it also directly in Carrara.
You could also use a spot which discovers your logo gradually, or you work the transparencies in shaders, or…
There are several manners of arriving there according to your final goal.
For animations of vine, if it would be me, I will test initially the metaballs but if you have AE, you can create a footage with an animated brush on transparent layer which you load in your shaders.
I often use this technique in displacement maps…

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I was thinking about primitive way to get these results: breaking up the geometry into several shading domains, and then gradually changing the alpha channel for each domain as a sequence.

But, how would one use an animated mask with metaballs to "grow" a vine? I mean, if one were to use a mask in the particle shader, it would shade each individual particle acoordingly, wouldn't it? How shall one use it to "shade" a path that all the metaballs should follow?

DUDU

I thought that you asked for two different things:
1-how to make grow a vine?
2- How to discover the logo gradually?

For the first question, there is small “a plugin” which is called “Ivy generator”, if I remember well, but I don't know if it is animable.
When I say that I would test the metaballs to create a vine which grows, it is something which I would test in first but I am not sure of the result and moreover, the metaballs are not easy to handel in Carrara…
The process of the image black and white animated (with an animated brush in AE) in the alpha channel of the shader could work with a vine picture in the colour channel (it's to test).
Do you have a link to see what kind of effect you want ?

DUDU

http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/

evilproducer

cobusp said:

DUDU_00001 said:

If is to use a simple mask, you can do it also directly in Carrara.
You could also use a spot which discovers your logo gradually, or you work the transparencies in shaders, or…
There are several manners of arriving there according to your final goal.
For animations of vine, if it would be me, I will test initially the metaballs but if you have AE, you can create a footage with an animated brush on transparent layer which you load in your shaders.
I often use this technique in displacement maps…

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I was thinking about primitive way to get these results: breaking up the geometry into several shading domains, and then gradually changing the alpha channel for each domain as a sequence.

But, how would one use an animated mask with metaballs to "grow" a vine? I mean, if one were to use a mask in the particle shader, it would shade each individual particle acoordingly, wouldn't it? How shall one use it to "shade" a path that all the metaballs should follow?

I can't help with all of it, but as to the particle shading there is an option you can enable in the emitter editor to use particle shading. You would then go into your shader and enable the particle shading option, which in turn gives a few options on how you want to define the effect. You can even transform the orientation.

Using the alpha channel as an example, you could put a color gradient with black at one end, and white at the other, then use the particel shader to define the parameters. Using age, you could set it up so that older particles fade away.

cobusp

Thanks for that input. I see in your last screen shot that "Enable Transform" is on. Any particular reason?

I think I'm onto something else: I experimented last night by putting a particle emitter inside the geometry that I wanted to fill up. The geometry was made invisible. Metablob particles actually did the job. I still have to tweak it as it still looks a bit crude, but indeed the object "grows"

evilproducer

cobusp said:

Thanks for that input. I see in your last screen shot that "Enable Transform" is on. Any particular reason?

I think I'm onto something else: I experimented last night by putting a particle emitter inside the geometry that I wanted to fill up. The geometry was made invisible. Metablob particles actually did the job. I still have to tweak it as it still looks a bit crude, but indeed the object "grows"

Just so they options weren't grayed out. I didn't have that applied to anything.