I have an earth with icicles hanging off of the bottom and I need to know how to make them melt. Well, they dont actually need to melt and disappear, all I need is a few drops of water that form and run down the icicle and then drip off. Any help and/or ideas is greatly appreacated.
The first idea that comes to mind would be to use the fluid simulator, but it might be hard to get the water to follow your icicle - I guess you could do it, but it’s probably easier/faster to fake it.
I would use retopo to create a path along the surface of your icicle (if you don’t know how to use retopo, search google using the key words ‘retopo’ and ‘blender’).
Once you have a mesh line on your icicle then convert it to a curve ( in edit mode using the python script ‘Edge to Curve’ ). You’ll probably want to extend the curve a bit so the water drips off of the end of the icicle and goes off screen.
Then use a mesh sphere parented to the curve path, make it softbody to make it wobble a bit like water, and maybe a little wind effect as it drips off the icicle.
The rest is just materials and fine tuning a bit to make it look good.
Thanks sooooo much!!! Im new to Blender but Ive used 3ds for a while in school and I can understand what your saying. Now that you say it, it seems obvious to me but the terminology is different in Blender. By the way, in my opinion, Blender is way better than 3ds. Not only is it free and can run on OS X but the amount of support is awesome. Thanks again!
I second that. I am a 3ds convert since a year or so now and have been working in blender since without looking back. It makes me smile when I tell someone that I use open source software instead, people are always immediately skeptical of how good it could be. Little do they know.