Simulation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 250

and a very simple material that mapped an outdoor image to
the refl ection vector.

If you want to use this technique with animation, the best
way is to set the different mapping spaces of the textures to an
Empty object. That Empty can be animated and in turn control
the motion and development of the textures. The Wave modi-
fi er is automatically animated—you only have to worry about
adjusting the speed of the animation for a believable effect.

Let's look at the Beast's spray gun assault for another fl uid-
faking technique. Figure 14.14 shows a still from shot 13.
This is the shot for which the true fl uid simulation was grossly
inappropriate. For initial visualization, I used a simple particle
system with a circle mesh for an emitter. The emitter is the
child of the sprayer, so the emitter follows its motion. Figure
14.15 shows the basic motion settings for the particle system.
To build the simulation with proper defl ection, the mother's
mesh is enabled as a defl ector in the master asset fi le. The
simulation is created and cached, then the mother's mesh is
reverted to its original state.

Figure 14.13 A river scene

Figure 14.14 The Beast hosing down his mother

Figure 14.15 The particle settings

When you have a particle system that moves in the way you want it to (particle systems are covered later in
this chapter), you need to decide how to visualize it. There are two basic ways to fake water with particles.
The fi rst is to use Metaballs , which are objects that when moved close enough to one another merge into
a single surface. Figure 14.16 shows a sequence of images of several metaballs moving closer together and
merging. When a particle system is visualized with metaballs, the effect can be similar to water. Figure 14.17
shows a particle system using metaballs. The Visualization panel is shown in Figure 14.18.