I am a relative newcomer to Blender, having worked mainly in Max.
I created the LAVA material from the book Bounce, Tumble, and Splash, and decided I wanted to animate the cloud Mix texture. This is used as an input to the Mix node of the Node Material. Ideally I just want to clouds to ‘swirl’ around to give the lava some motion.
I’ve been playing with the TEXTURE IPO curves, but very few of the channels seem to do anything – Noise size does something, but not want I want. Ideally I just want to change a random ‘seed’ or some other value that makes it look like it is ‘roiling’.
Anyone have any suggestions? I’ve been looking for tutorials about animating cloud textures, and most just seem to change offset X, Y, or Z, which I can’t get to work in the Mix texture.
Here is an example of a stencil map mixing two materials. I have animated the x,y,z offset of the stencil map, but it has no effect. I guess Blender can not do what 3DSMax can?
Feel free to examine the file and post a solution. I’d love to see this in action.
I don’t know this Lava Material, but if your cloud texture is mapped to a Material, you could choose Object as Map Input, typing in the name of an empty for example.
This way, you could animate the texture, using the empty.
Edit: BTW, size and offset animation for textures is done with the Material IPOtype. Just select the texturechannelnumber on the right side of the IPOtype: Materialbutton in the IPOwindowHeader. (Just in case, this is what you’re looking for)
To animate the texture, you could, instead of using a TextureNode, add a 3rd MaterialNode with the Material, set to shadeless and the Mix texture assigned.
This makes shure there is an Object to Texture relationship for animation.
(See attached Lava.blend)
But this would animate the Color, but not the DisplacementModifier.
This could be done with the Mapping to an Empty version, I mentioned in my last post.
Because you can set the Empty as Texturecoordinate in the Modifier as well.
(See attached Lava_Empty.blend)