#Animating a glacier
13 messages in this thread
I have a job to animate a glacier retreating over a landscape. If anyone has
any tips or thoughts on the subject I'd love to hear them.
Ian.
Hi Ian,
can you be more specific as to how it should move, or what parts of the scene
have to change when it moves? etc…
-Kyle
Kyle,
We're talking end of the last ice age. The ice is receding back to the north
To be honest I'm not sure that the ice itself actually moves or it just melts
back like a sort of receding hairline. I'll have to consult the geologist on
that one.
I guess I'd hoped that someone on ASOFT had tackled a similar situation. My
first thought was to create morph objects. But it has occured to me to try
BonesPro to manipulate a mesh.
Ian.
Ian,
I just did something that I think is similar to the effect that you're
trying to get. I had to make a car form out of the street – where the street
starts to bulge as it looks like something is pushing itself up. the amorphous
from then slowly constrains itself to the shape of the car. what I did was use
the SEEZ_I.IXP routine (avail in the ipas lib) to create a 8 bit zbuffer image
of the car – so the high points are white, and the low points are black. then,
I used the image as a displacement map on a grid, that I applied SKIN to.
voila! perfect match to the car geometry. I also took the image into Photoshop
and created some blurred copies to use as intermediate morph targets before I
arrive at the refined shape.
It worked out really well. I could send you (or upload) a flic of it if you're
interesed.
-Kyle
Very very creative use of SEEZ, Displace and Skin, Kyle. I'd love to see the
flic, if it's not too large to upload to the DL's.
– G
Gary,
I'm finalizing it right now, I do a procedural wipe with opacity/bump maps to
get rid of the street and reveal the car underneath.
I'll upload it soon
-Kyle
Kyle- sounds very interesting- I'd love to see it.
It would be a receding hairline look, with a lots of chunks left
behind half-buried in the ground. These chunks would melt and form
ponds. Also, there is a lot of garbage pushed to the front of the
glacier – large boulders, gravel, etc. As the glacier stops
advancing, this material is dumped and forms morains.
Technically speaking, the glacier doesn't move back or even stop
moving, it just melts faster than it moves forward.
LAM (grew up near Morain, Ohio, where the last big glacier ended)
re: glacier animation.
Thanks, I'm beginning to gat a handle on this.
Iaqn.
>>glacier retreating…
First, I would ask how does a glacier retreat? Does it retreat by slowly
melting just at the leading edge, or more likely, by overall melting,
sublimating, and settling over a wide area? Given a fairly hilly terrain
(i.e., just been scarred by a glacier!), I would try modeling a single (fairly
organic) sloped glacier mass protruding into the valleys from beneath the
terrain mesh. (Use Displace and perhaps fractalize or a good bump map?)
To make it move, my first thought would be to make a copy or two for morph
targets, then manually distort the morph targets with a little vertex editing
near the front (retreating) edges of the ice mass. Perhaps gradually lowering
the sloped glacier mass while morphing would give the appearance of a
retreating glacier. But then again, maybe not. <g>
JKJ
Re: glacier animating.
Thanks for your input. Yes, I think I've got to consult the geologist
about the nature of this sort of glacier movement. I don't think
that is like the frozen rivers that flow from mountains.
Ian,
I'm putting some finishing touches on it this weekend, I'll put it up on
monday.
-Kyle
I've animated the tide rising with a glass block being pushed through the
valley…
sounds the same. My frien d Jim Stipes of Univ. of Washington State did
an award winning movie on earth formations/glaciers etc.