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Texturing inner and outer surfaces of a tube object to follow a slice animation
Here’s something I thought would be easy but instead seems tricky. I made a simple tube object with a narrow inner/outer radius and then sliced it approximately in half, creating a semi-circular wall panel. I want to use the slice function so I can easily animate the curved wall growing/shrinking in size. On the inner side of the curved surface I want a grey color; on the outer surface a blue color. The front/back function of the texture tag doesn’t work because technically the entire surface is considered “front”. I then created a shader layer inside a single material and used a gradient, with ‘none’ knots, to wipe between the two desired colors, but this only seems to move horizontally along the tube object. I cannot easily figure out how to separate the inner surface from the outer surface. Other than making the object editable and using separation tags or creating two identical colored objects and slightly off-setting them, does anyone know an easy way to accomplish this kind of texture separation on a tube object? Thanks for any assistance or suggestions.
Regards, Eric.
Post 2K Motion Graphics -
2 Replies
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Instead of using the tube primitive I would create a long thin cube object with lots of subdivisions on the long axis. Then I’d use a spline wrap deformer to bend it along a circle spline and adjust the start/end parameters to create the slice effect.
You can make the cube editable and then create polygon selection tags to assign materials.
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Thanks Adam, that’s exactly the method I was looking for. I really do need to think about deformers more often, rather than relying on the ease of animating parametric objects. Much appreciated.
Regards, Eric.
Post 2K Motion Graphics
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