Following my previous lava test, I decided to redo it with some displace and use the texture and material nodes. Some time, I plan to write a tutorial on how to make some realistic lava an animating it through a winding river. I don’t have the new test animated yet. I will do that soon.
The animated lava might need a little tweaking still. I’m rendering an animation right now to put on youtube. I would try to explain it, but the animated lava is completely different than still lava, especially when it is winding down a river. I plan to write a tutorial though.
Usually people will want a .blend file of this to use as a springboard to make their own lava, since it’s a displaced plane with procedurals the file can’t be that big.
Sorry, I would post the rendered animation, but I’m having a bit of problem animating the hardened lava. Does anyone know how to animate individual offset values for a texture node, specifically looking at the translate node? Right now, I am just plugging in a time node to the whole offset value, resulting in all the hardened lava moving down the river and to the left. It also puts too much distortion from the offset z. If anyone knew how to animate it in one of the 2.5 builds, that would be helpful too.
Anyways, as soon as I can get this animated correctly, I will show how to animate various currents in the same river. I’m also working on some splashes, sparks, smoke, waterfalls, and possibly fire. Hopefully I can have everything done by the 25th.
Yeah I have had trouble trying to do that in the past. I ended up just using empties attached to the texture, then ipo’ed on an infinite move (extrapolate IPO).
I was going to do that too, but it would limit the animation possibilities a lot. The basic method to make the textures deform along a curve:
-Add a plane, lattice, and curve
-Parent the lattice to the curve and the plane to the lattice
-Then form the curve in the path you want your river to go
That way, when you animate, the textures will follow the objects undeformed coords, then getting distorted by the lattice. Since there is a displace texture on the object as a modifier, the texture can’t be animated through the deformation of the lattice and follow an object.
But, maybe I missed something somewhere. I might try mapping the displace onto the material itself. Usually its not as flexible that way.
Sorry, I was debating whether I should enter this. I’ll probably do something today. My mom doesn’t like it when I’m on the computer too long. Oh, and I got Venom’s lab DVD and I was watching that.
