Slow/Fast/Slow Material Animation

acealmighty13

I'm trying to create an animation that starts and ends slow but the center is going pretty quickly. I have a white bar that will be an emissive, and acting as a beam of energy going through a static mesh I have set up. It'll travel from one end to the other starting slow, picking up speed quickly, then slowing back down near the end.

JoakimMellergard

How do you animate it right now? I'd use a gradient to define speed.

PolyBend

(Sin(Time)+1)/2 gives you the ramp over time as 0 - 1 - 0 for a single second (I think, its been awhile). Change the paramaters needed to make it faster or slower. Work with that result with another time node for your main speed on the panner and it should work.

acealmighty13

Thanks for the tips. I had almost forgotten about this post. PolyBend, So, If I read your equation right, it should be Sine and Time nodes attached to a Multiply Node, that result and a Constant of 1 attached to an Addition node, with that result and a Constant node of 2 attached to a Division node. With the constants being the parameters for changing speed. And the final Time and Panner node is added or multiplied with the final result of your equation, showing the varying speed. Correct?

I haven't opened UDK, so I'm going off what I have learned recently and surprisingly, what I typed makes sense to me. Ha ha!

JoakimMellergard

The nodes that you need for making PolyBends ramp would be in this order:

Time ---> Sin ---> Add (1) ---> Divide(2)

No Multiply node.