CompuServe Thread

Jason, Here's the basic process, minus the tweaking 🙂 -Say you've got this car mesh. Render a top view of it through the video post with SeeZ.ixp last in the queue and antialiasing turned off. (SeeZ is an .ipx routine that Tom Hudson wrote and is available here in the asoft forum. If you put it in your Video Post queue, It will calculate an 8-bit grayscale image based on the zbuffer of your scene – where geometry that is closest to your camera, is rendered white, and areas that have nothing or geometry that is furthest away from your camera, is rendered black. Everything else is some shade of gray.) -So now you've got this 'elevation map' of the car. I made a grid object with 100 grids on width and depth, with a height of 1 and no grids. If you take the image directly into Displace.pxp, and use it to affect a grid object, you'll get a shape that looks like you threw a bedsheet over the car. I made the grid at a high resolution so that I could see all of the little details of the car – like the little black rubber thing that goes around the windsheild. Note that creating a grid object with grids.pxp that has 0 grids on one of the axes, produces and object that will Skin.axp fine. I didn't use Skin on this because I had to apply the mapping coordinates by planar methods so there would be no seam between the grid and the rest of the street. -I took the z buffer image into photoshop and made several different blurred versions of it that I could use to make intermediate morph targets for the street. I even used ripple znd zig-zag filters on one of the images. -Then I created different morph targets in displace, and morphed the original, flat grid. -once the street was big enough to hide the car, I unhid the car from undeneath and wiped off the street with an opacity map. The opacity map was created through this method – 1) create a grayscale image in a paint program that is very amorphus, light and dark areas blending together in irregular forms. 2) create a grid via GRID.PXP and load it into displace 3) then use the grayscale image you made to displace it. 4) assign white neon to it and create a box object bigger than your displaced grid, but very thin – make this new box object a matte obj. 5) in the KF, animate the matte objet moving slowly, straight down, over X frames from above the grid to below the grid 6) render a top view and it will slowly reveal the mesh, giving your resultant flic a irregular, but procedural, animated opacity map to use – it works really well to get a look that's not standard. -Kyle