C4D Liquid on Human Body
by Stephen Konsor
on
Jun 30, 2009 at 9:39:54 pm
Hey Folks!
I am in the middle of making an animation for a medical company and I have run into a spot of trouble. What I am trying to do is have a medical wand with a sponge on the end that liquid comes out of and covers the body. Basically its like using a paint brush on the chest of a human body. I have the body and the device modeled, but what I am running into is having the liquid come out and cover the area of the body that the brush just went over. When you use this device you, you basically make a circular pattern starting from the middle of the chest to the outside. I have created a spline for the bruch tip to follow, but I do not know how to get the liquid to come out and "stick" to the surface of the body.
Some thing I tried was to duplicate just the chest polygons of the body, bring them a little forward, and the animated a spline path and sweep nurb object inside a boole object so that it can kind of act as an animated mask. That kind of works, but it seems that I get some wierd and stray polygons. Do I need to convert the sweep nurb to polygons or something? I could also composite in AE, but I am still having trouble figuring out how to animate the "liguid" cover chest portion.
Re: C4D Liquid on Human Body by Stephen Konsor on Jul 1, 2009 at 3:01:19 am
AWESOME! I am new to C4D, so how would I do that? I am guessing that I could animate a black and white "mask" video in AE and then bring it into C4D material under the Alpha Channel? Can you shoot me some quick details on that? THANKS for your help already. It is much apprecitated.
Re: C4D Liquid on Human Body by Adam Trachtenberg on Jul 1, 2009 at 2:47:49 pm
Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. There's not a lot to it: I would render the body from a top view, with a close up on the area to be swabbed and use that as a reference in AE to draw the animated mask. Do an animation so you can follow the paintbrush thing in AE.
Then load the animated mask into the alpha of a texture, set the other channels to whatever you want to simulate the painted look, and then drop that material on the body object so it's tag is to the right of the existing tag. If you go to the viewport's Display menu and enable "stacked materials" you should see the result in the viewport. You'll also have to go the animated material's Editor tab and check the "Animate Preview" box.
The only caveat is that you'll have to play around with the alpha material's UV mapping to get it to match up. You can probably get away with Flat mapping (texture tag>Projection). Use the texture axis tool to rotate and scale the projection so it matches up.
