decal control of hair length

[johnl3d]

made a decal in AM to control hair growth and used corn stalk image

corn.mov

[johnl3d]

here the qt decal

cornc.mov

[NancyGormezano]

That's fantastic John! - I love it - I've always wanted to do some "growth" type thingies - thanks for all your ideas (again & again - you provide inspiration)

[Guest mrsl13]

Thanks John....always have my interest.....

 

Mike C

[johnl3d]

Thanks for the kind words

 

I'm posting the project file without the "corn.tga" and growth decal shown above but the model and material used to make the decal in still there I did however delete the chor I used to record it earlier but it should be easy to reproduce. The corn i used for the QT posted is still there. Because of time restraints I set the density of the corn to .01 and had a small area and thus the open area at the end .

 

By the way any Inspiration is due to lack of sleep and diet coke and a 50 mile commute back and forth to work

 

 

i think you have to right click and save as to get the project

corn.prj

[strohbehn]

Hi John,

 

I don't think I've ever replied to one of your posts yet, but every time I see one from you I smile and eagerly watch the movie to see what the latest innovation is.

 

You've done some really interesting things, and I'm glad you're a regular on this forum.

 

When I get the chance someday, I'm going to download all of your sample files (to make sure I have them on file) and have a great time learning the particulars of sprites, particles, decals, etc. It's gonna be great fun.

 

Thanks for posting here, and keep up the good work!

 

Mark

[NancyGormezano]

Hi John - I downloaded your project & cornc.mov - and was playing around with it - I found I was not able to set the frame number for the cornc.mov movie (or even a simple tga sequence) so that I could choose the length of the hair in a fashion other than straight thru from beginning to end.

 

In other words, I found that I could animate a regular "color" decal (using either a movie, or tga sequence) and could select the frame # in any order I wanted. eg frame no# 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 3, 2, 1 of the movie etc and it would play fine. However when i tried to animate the sequence and use it as a property controlling the length of the hair that the animation (eg cornc.mov) would only play from start to end - could never get it to go in reverse or out of sequence - it would just stay on the last frame - Have you had any luck with doing this for hair?

[johnl3d]

haven't tried this let me try simple sample ..i think tga sequence thoiugh...but will let you know...

[johnl3d]

Hmm not sure why but a tga sequence as a regular color decal is controlled by picking decal sequence frame for each frame of animation so you can have say 1 1 1 5 3 1 2 2 etc. But if you take the same decal sequence and change its type to other and have it control length of hair it ignores your choices

 

 

 

Not sure if this is on purpose or if it should be reported

 

 

the project below takes a patch and applies a frame from a color sequence inluded and follows the choices but if you add hair and change the decal to control the hair it doesn't seem to follow and just does the sequence in order but if you use the sequence and film a animation of the color map and use that to control the hair length that would be a work around

 

john

colortest.zip

[johnl3d]

heres a qt of the work around..it rough used just the 5 patches in project above but it does give you control

cornchange.mov

[NancyGormezano]

Thanks so much John for investigating, at least I know it's not just me - I also came to the conclusion of doing the same workaround for controlling length of hair in a non-linear fashion