After 'How To' on edge highlights?

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi,

I was wondering if people could suggest a way of animating a highlight (shiny bit!) to move around the egde of a (non shiny) object.

I have some extruded text in a logo I’m making, and I want to have a bright reflection move along the edge of the text.

I’m thinking of splitting the front of the text from the sides, making the front matt (and shadeless) and the sides very shiny. Then moving a light left to right across the scene. Hopefully there will be enough of the sides visible to show a reflection.

The other possibility is to use the method in ‘Barts welding logo’ tute, to turn the text into a particle path.

I’d be grateful of anyone could suggest a way of getting this effect in Blender.

Cheers
Stephen

2

I did a fun thing. I made a .png texture of a black square with a transparent stripe through the middle. Applied the texture to a spotlight, set Use Alpha and Extend.

In the Texture and Input, I set the texture coordinates to Object and put the name of my lamp in the box.

Then, using IPO Curves, I animated the lap’s rotation along the Z so that it made a path across the letters. Works pretty cool, the lamp only shines out of the transparent stripe and paints the letters. I wonder what tweaking you could do to make this look cool, like make the transparent stripe fuzzy or something.

Hope this helps.