triggering animation

[Da_elf]

how would i go about having a field of grass thats shaded white and when gradient mask moves across the ground it will trigger a mask that runs up the blades of grass. i know its possible that the mask on the ground will trigger the entire blade to change color using vray fur but id like it to look like when the ground acquires color the color bleeds up to the top tip of the grass

[Neilg]

Multiscatter can use a mask to control animation. Do an animated proxy and set it to black=0, white=100, or whatever. Not sure about forest.

[Da_elf]

the thing is if i have the animation as the gradient moving from the root of the grass up the blade to the tip can multiscatter trigger that animation? so that when the ground plane is black the animation stays off. then when the white hits the blade it triggers the gradient ramp to animate and at the end of the animation to stop and not loop or ping pong? this is rough but like this

[Neilg]

Sorry, doesn't do what I thought it did. I just did a test and it seems pretty useless.


try the demo of forest, it sounds like it does what I was expecting multiscatter to do - http://www.itoosoft.com/forestpack/r...fanimation.php
"using a map to define what animation sample to get for each item..... a black pixel in the map will take an animation sample at frame 0, a white pixel at frame 30, and interpolated samples for pixels in the gray range."


So white doesn't play your animation, white is the final frame of your animation, and the speed it plays is determined by how much time you take to pass through the greyscale between the back/white values.

[Da_elf]

so it would do any type of animation applied to the object to be scattered?
sounds like forest pro might be solution.

[Neilg]

I have no idea, you're best off trying the demo. We've just bought it but it's not installed yet, i'm going from the help file alone.

[jacksc02]

I am pretty sure you can do this in multiscatter.
It all depends on the UVW mapping of the grass and the ground. If you can get the 2 to sync up then it will do what you want.

[Da_elf]

the synch should be automatic. it seems like forest pro would do it as long as it takes into account aaaalll animation tracks of the object being scattered

[Neilg]

I am pretty sure you can do this in multiscatter.
It all depends on the UVW mapping of the grass and the ground. If you can get the 2 to sync up then it will do what you want.

I tested this, and multiscatter always has the animation playing, you just control the offset with a map. Maybe if the black was -5000 and the white was zero, but you'd still get it jumping around and flicking if you went into white for 20 frames then back to black too quickly.

Not very useful imo.

[Da_elf]

hrmmm. ill try downloading the forest demo and see if that does it. i want it to look like the grass gets nice and green radiating out from a part on the ground and i dont want each blade to jump from dull to green in one go. i want the green to seep up the blade from root to tip.

[cheerioboy]

I'm guessing since you want such specific animation on the grass it's going to be a close up shot... so I tried my hand at putting a little test together using pflow which might do the trick... take a look

[Da_elf]

yup. thats pretty much what i had in mind