Should I do it through surfacing or lighting?
by Markford Astina
on
Jul 26, 2008 at 5:48:13 pm
I'm triying to create brain neurons.
The propblem:
I'm trying to simulate electrical signals traveling within the brain neurons.
The electric signals travel down the neural paths as points of light. When it hits the neuron itself it lights it up in a flash followed by a wave of light emitting from it's center. Then the signal/light continues to travel down the neural pathway(s) (they could be split into two or more depending on the amount of pathways connected to that neuron) onto the next neuron(s).
How would I go about doing this? Animated surface or with a lights pointed at the pathway from the outside?
I tried putting lights and making it travel down the neural pathway but:
1) it's a lot of work for a lot neurons
2) you can't really see the effect of the light from the outside of the neural pathway.
Re: Should I do it through surfacing or lighting? by Ola Haldor Voll on Aug 3, 2008 at 1:25:59 am
I don't know the "right answer" to this, but I think I'd go with doing it through surfacing, creating an animation through XYZ on position and probably scale too, would do the trick, I think. Remember I did something similar to a car once, which had to transform from old, crashed and rusty to brand new and fresh from the factory - ended up doing it through dozens of morphs for the crash impacts, and a few animated procedurals per property (color, diffuse, spec, gloss, bump, reflection) for the surface of the car.
Re: Should I do it through surfacing or lighting? by Rich Jackson on Sep 30, 2008 at 7:34:23 pm
A good way to do this is to move a point light inside of the geometry. Make sure that the light has a fall off to it. You can see how big the fall off is in any view but Camera view. Set the surface to have a translucency. ( I like to use a gradation that affects the incidence angle). You should get something like the example.
