What I would like to achieve is to show the heat map slowly spreading from a small area to other parts of the model. It doesn’t need to be technically accurate, as long as it demonstrates the concept.
I was thinking it might be possible to do this by animating a shader, or fade a shader by using a boolean modifier.
Or maybe its possible to do this within the physics simulation tools in Blender?
Very fast (but even more inaccurate) way would be someting like creating a gradient texture, manipulate the colors with a color ramp, place it at the source of heat and then simply scale it up with time. The accuracy would be very much dependant on the shape of your model here.
Wow, this is pretty much what I was looking for. This also introduced me to new features in Blender I previously never used. I’ll have a play around with the blend file and see how well it works for multiple connected objects. I’d imagine if they shared the same empty then heat dissipation will spread evenly across all objects with the same gradient shader? I’ll let you know how I progress later. Thanks for your help.
You are right with your assumption. However you will have a problem then with heat beeing dissipated through empty space also. Just imagine the texture as a three dimensional thing with the center at that empty, giving any surface (or volume) the color the gradient has at the interection. So there is no way to make the heat flow through the object since it only flows throug space in general.
