I’m working on an idea for a movie in which in conjunction with Icarus will make a person appear in real live moving footage turn to dust. So I did a test. Here’s my scene:
A simple plane in front of the camera using a texture with alpha values and a standard picture gives you this:
Now the question: Is there a way to turn this plane to dust, by using unborn particles or a similar method?
You can control the timing of particles with a Texture. This feature uses the intensity values of a texture to determine when, between the particle start and end times, to emit from a certain location. For example a black and white blend texture would begin to generate particles and, with the emission ending at the other side.
The example image has a plane with a musgrave texture and the Unborn option turned on.
Now all we need is a texture option to do the same for alpha (use texture intensity as alpha an threshold between certain frames) and we can burn any Mesh to dust!
This text piece was part of one of the release and devel logs on blender3d.org.
watch herefor some more feature details (there’s a picture and some video to download, too). You have to look at the bottom of the page…
I think this may help you with your problem. Indeed your idea using unborn particles was the right one.
You can control the timing of particles with a Texture. This feature uses the intensity values of a texture to determine when, between the particle start and end times, to emit from a certain location. For example a black and white blend texture would begin to generate particles and, with the emission ending at the other side.
The example image has a plane with a musgrave texture and the Unborn option turned on.
Now all we need is a texture option to do the same for alpha (use texture intensity as alpha an threshold between certain frames) and we can burn any Mesh to dust!
I don’t get it… what do I do? How do I activate texture controlled emission? I don’t see a button.
this doesn’t shatter the plane or the image to pieces. you have to use the same textures as for particle control to controll the alpha-value of the planes material, so the image gets transparent in the same speed and direction as the particles run over it.
Sorry, I don’t have the time to explain it now. I am just on the way to a friend who’s waiting. I’m late.
Dude. I am having the same problem. I first saw this new feature in Blender’s release notes and I can’t seem to figure it out either.. I thought it could be used for something like acid dropping onto a surface. As your results Redbyte, I too couldn’t get it to look right once rendered.
I think it has to do with the alpha part of it all.
You could try using an animated texture. I created one that turned from white to black from left to right over a span of 50 frames. Then loaded the animation as a texture in the alpha channel. I also set the particles to end at frame 50. They didnt follow the animation perfectly, but with minor tweaking with the particles starting and ending frames im sure you would get your desired effect. I have a small .mov for u to watch if your interested. It would look even better if the animated texture faded from white to black, maybe with a grainy noise to simulate sand. I just wanted to see if it would work.