Animating "illustrative moving arrows?"

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I know that I have seen a tutorial on this, but I can’t remember where . . . :o

I need to illustrate (toon style…) that air flows through a pipe system and warms up as it does so. I want to do this by (a) laying a gradient blue-to-red texture over the pipe, and then (b) animating stylized arrows that run along the pipe, either on it or a short distance from it … these arrows also changing color as they travel.

Yes, I can piece together how this can be done. But, I know there was a really nice tute on this … somewhere …

2

Didn’t find a (Blender) tute, but I did piece together an acceptable arrow-shape, and a little bit of Curve Deform should now do nicely.

The “red to hot” is simply a gradient. The piping is simply a skinned Bezier curve.

3

I am uploading an example of arrows traveling along a path, being deformed by the curve modifier.

Maybe these links can help out.


http://matthieu3d.free.fr/TutoVira1/tuten.html

Attachments

Arrows_3.blend (247 KB)

4

I’ve done something similar in the past by simply animating UV’s along a mesh.