Filed under: MDDN241

241 Moss + Rust

I have now got the rust shards transforming into moss.

Using a noise texture I have gotten an effect where the moss appears in areas which get larger, as if they were growing. Rather than the materials slowly blending together.

However I am a bit stuck on what to make the surrounding areas, espically the 'floor' where the main shards will collide into. I would like to use a muddy or natural ground texture as this coincides with the transformation from man made to natural. Although I think that the color pallete might clash.

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241 Soft Mods

Thinking of ways to animate a sphere to be interesing is difficult.

By using 3 or 4 soft mods at once I'm hoping to make areas of the sphere wobble back and forth. This could be quite interesting to see. As if there way something inside trying to force its way out.

This ties in with the explosion of the shards later on in the animation.

241 Shattering

In order to shatter my sphere of rust and throw the pieces away from the centre I thought I would need to use a gravity field. However this has been an absolute pain to get to work. It seems that with numbers of greater than 5 shards maya can't handle the calculations needed to move the shards. Therefore, to stop it crashing every five minutes, I have changed the way the shards move. They jsut move with simple keyframes and physically moving the pieces to their desired points. Its relatively realistic, its happening so fast the eye can't really tell the difference.

241 Continued

(download)
Some more progress pictures.

Two showing the nice moss effect I am going to use (perhaps by growing it on the mettalic surface rather than just blending it over).

And one showing how I got a sphere to shatter. Very pleased with this shattering effect as had no idea how I was going to explode my sphere otherwise.