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Modeling: paint flowing off a sphere – big issues
Hey everyone. I have a serious problem right now with this scene I am trying to create (in c4d R11.5). Let me first put you in the picture: my client wants an image of a sphere coated in blue paint but with this paint oozing off and revealing an orange sphere underneath. Not only that – he wants it dripping/flowing down – as thick paint does – onto another orange sphere and covering it in the blue. Do you get the idea? Right, well what I’m really stuck doing is creating a paint coat with a wavy topline.
I can make a b-spline and wrap it around the sphere no problem and this gives me what I want regards the top-line of the paint. The trouble I’m having is in creating a shell type object with the wavy top-line part. It’s like a sphere with the top third cut off except the cut is not straight but wavy all the way around. It’s been driving me crazy. I strongly suspect the only real way to do this is by manually dragging points around placing them using the projected b-spline as a template but I’m hoping there is an easier way to do it. If anybody knows of a good way to accomplish this task then can you please let me know? I would appreciate it very, very much.
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4 Replies
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Depending on the look you are after this may be wrong but a wavy line can be done with an animated gradient with turbulence in the alpha channel. It seemed hard, while testing, to have a totally clean line with some wave without moving to settings that break the edge up but it may be possible with some patience. After that some noise for bump (sub-pixel displacement) animated to look like it’s moving down, timed to be about the speed of the animated alpha.
I’ll test a movie upload…
and the file (v12)
1202_painttest.c4d.zip -
That’s quite an elegant solution Brian and thank you very much for taking the time to delve into this. It’s very much appreciated. I had entertained the thought of providing a texture based solution but I decided I will only do this as a last resort. This client is not only knowledgeable with regards to 3 production methods but also very picky and demanding the highest quality work.
I’ve modeled a rectangular speaker in the meantime to demonstrate exactly what it is I’m after – it’s a lot easier to do this on a rectangular object than it is a sphere. Take a look …..
Now, it’s not animatable but that’s not a problem on this project as the final result is a still image but like I said, because it is a still image the client expects the highest quality – hence my desire to find a way to model the desired effect. What I did with the speaker was model a wavy b-spline and then extruded it along the Z axis and threw it into a boole along with a slightly larger copy of the speaker and subtracted it. Then I rotated it 90 degrees into the X axis, adjusted the spline a little bit to make it different, and then threw it into another boole with the result from the last one.
This approach doesn’t work with a sphere however. Due to the curvature of the surface the first Z boole subtraction leaves these nasty slices in the X axis – unlike the rectangular subtraction which leave a nice straight cut in the X axis.
I’ll upload further imagery tomorrow to illustrate the point.
In any case, thanks once again Brian; thank you very, very much for taking the time to approach this 🙂 If the worst comes to the worst I guess I’ll just have to put my tail between my legs and settle for the texture based solution but hopefully it won’t come to that. I’ll try dragging the points around manually beforehand and if that fails it’s texture time.
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I never picked up that it was to be a still, I guess dripping had me thinking animation. How about something like this?
This one’s v10.5…
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OHHHHHH!! Thank you soooo much Brian. That’s perfect!!! 😀 I never thought to use a cylinder as the boole object. And yeah, it’s an image for a poster – sorry I neglected to mention that in my initial post. The dripping will actually be a continuous flow from the upper object to the lower object and the lower object has to have one of those small piles that flowing paint makes too. I think I’m on my way there now however. Thank you ever so much for sharing this with me Brian. It’s been so so helpful and I really appreciate it. This is what you get for telling someone “Yeah, yeah, I can do that – no problem” without going off and making a few tests first 😀
Kind regards
Alan
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