I’ve been trying to figure this one out for awhile but I’ve run into a road block each time I think I’ve come up with something.
Basically here is what I’m trying to figure out. You have a ship going through a rectangle, that rectangle is the force field that protects the workers inside the hanger bay from the vacuum of space.
Well, what I’m trying to figure out is how to make the rectangle ripple outward when a ship is going ‘through’ it. I’m not talking about it rippling out in one central area, but in every part of that ship that is going through it (even corner that is touching the force field)
Is it at all possible to get blender to do this? Or is it a limitation I can’t get around?
Have you tried a fluid sim? have the ship slowly move into a large rectangle of fluid and set the ship as an obstacle. This should cause the fluid surface to ripple based on the shape of the ship.
IF you are talking about using nodes, I’ve had a very hard time getting those to actually ‘work’ (IE: Motion Blur) or am I completely misunderstanding you? (Fluid Sim?)
I’m going to sound like a fool here, but I’ve tried getting those settings to work and it just isn’t working here. For the fluid the rec just disappears on me after I bake and then I can’t get it back (it just vanish’s, almost like you delete it, but yet I can’t ‘undo’ it and get it back)
As for the soft bodies, I must be doing ‘something’ wrong with the settings because I just can’t get it to work (I even went as far as copying the settings from the Blender file you provided Mack, but still a no go)
Kalshion Its possible the blender version is different…
I would try a grid with large amount of points and collide object/objects
to it with softbody. Like if you have a grid and pass object through it
,it pretty much looks like through water comes an object.
question is do you need it really super highly realistic?
else i would suggest to just make a front isometric render of the ship (no lights and white bg) so you get a nice outline of the front render.
now take that to photoshop, add a stroke around it, the stroke will indicate the ripple (thickness and sharpness so use a soft stroke to make nice smooth waves).
now duplicate the stroke a few times as you want the frequency of the ripples to be, preferably even fading the stroke outwards (alpha = weaker wave).
take this as your texture map to blender, put on the forcefield and add a displacement modifier, link the texture to it.
to make it animated just let the size of the texture increase as the ship passes through the forcefield.
this texture also can be used in stencil mode to animate your electricity (or sth) map to go along with the ripples.
i would scale a texture mapped to an empty that expands a bright-like circle to match the ship’s radius as it enters. The ship will hide the inner part, and it will look like the edge seams itself to the outline of the hull.