Melting Ice Cream running down screen to form words?

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Alright this one is a little complicated so hear me out. I am making a title sequence for a film project I am part of, and one of the little vingettes I want to do: is have a blob of Ice Cream fall off a cone, we follow the blob down, it hits the invisible ground (the entire title sequence will have stars as a background), then a liquid that looks like melted ice cream pours out (Think along the lines of the title sequence of Sweeney Todd), the melted Ice Cream pous down the frame (Kinda likes it’s running down the camera lens) and then forms the name of one of the people in the title sequence, and then continues to run, and then the camera pans down to the next scene.

I’ve been tring to wrap my head around how to do this one, and havn’t gotten very far. So I thought I’d get your guys opinion on how I should tackle this one…

Thanks in adavnce…

#2

could you post a freehand drawed storyboard ?
but maybe with of course liquid simulations and some kind of weight paint for the ice to get stuck in the letters .

#3

My first thought is the same as TweakingKnobs’: use Fluid simulation to create a Fluid with the viscosity of ice cream, which pours onto a plane mesh Obstacle with a moderate friction value, that has a second mesh Obstacle with a very high friction value on top of it in the shape of the words. The setup to do the whole thing as one uninterrupted pan will end up a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine.

The blob hits the slightly angled plane and triggers the Fluid, which slides freely down the surface, sticking to the words when it touches them. This might be doable with UV mapping as well, a black and white image of the words using the two values to determine friction (Nodes?), but I’m not sure.

Superficially, it seems like a tricky shot either way, if only because of the high processing time needed for the fluid simulation; but once it’s baked correctly, the camera movement can be animated without having to rebake.

It might be easiest to use the new Fluid Control tools in the SimPhysics branch and 2.48 – especially to have the blob splat into fluid as a single uninterrupted object – but with some experimentation, it should definitely be doable in plain 2.47 as well.

#4

I once had to make letters come up out of a pool of molten metal. I animated the sequence in reverse. I started with the fluid in the shape of the letters and let it crash down and form a pool. I suggest you try to animate the sequence in reverse, render it, then bring it in blender sequence editor and flip it’s time. (reverse it.)

#5

you could also try playing with metaballs :yes: (just an idea)

#6

yep , but i guess this way its will very likely look its reversed , maybe not , but there most be a right way yo do it right.