Animated material on a cylinder

knak47

I am sure this is very basic but I looked through the Material Compendium and although it is helpful in definning what the nodes do it is not very helpful in describing there common use applications.

What I want is a ring of light to travel up a cylindrical mesh and then disappear. like a teleporter emitting a ring of light that pulsates and travels upward then fades away.

kind of like this picture ORB posted

knak47

So I got the texture to pan up, I guess all I would need now is for it to fade in and fade out at the top and bottom of the cylinder mesh that it is applied to. Any idears?

samcole

What about a gradiated mask. Excuse the spelling. But it would be black at the top and bottom, and grey to white in the middle. Basically the mask would allow it to 'fade' in and 'fade' out at top and bottom while its panning.

m4dcow

You could also paint the vert colour or alpha on the cylinder, and use that as what determines where it fades out.

passerby

ya gradient or vert colour, if you want to use a gradient with out needed a extra texture sample, you could mask out 1 channel of a texture coordinate node and use it as a gradient.

knak47

Ok I will probably go with the gradient mask approach. Where do I plug it in, the opacity mask input? And does anyone know where I can find a resource that shows the nodes how they are most commonly used. Because as I said the material compendium just provides jargon about the nodes. I would like to see there uses in action.

samcole

If you have the money, get 3D motives UDK materials part. 1 video that Ryan James Smith made. It goes over holographic materials, and talks about adding a material mask, the the channels you would need to use.

knak47

samcole wrote: »

What about a gradiated mask. Excuse the spelling. But it would be black at the top and bottom, and grey to white in the middle. Basically the mask would allow it to 'fade' in and 'fade' out at top and bottom while its panning.

How would I go about doing this? I assumed if I were to take an alpha and plug it into the Opacity Mask input that has the blend mode set to Blend_Masked, that It would fade in and out. But I cant get it to work.

here is a screen shot
http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee301/knak47/Polycount/matyerialMasked.jpg

samcole

I'll have to check the video again, off the top of my head I can't remember. You could always ask the guy who made the tutorial. His name on the forums is virtuosic.

m4dcow

knak47 wrote: »

How would I go about doing this? I assumed if I were to take an alpha and plug it into the Opacity Mask input that has the blend mode set to Blend_Masked, that It would fade in and out. But I cant get it to work.

here is a screen shot
http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee301/knak47/Polycount/matyerialMasked.jpg

I think you have to make the material BLEND_Translucent, BLEND_Masked as far as I know takes the edge of a 1 bit alpha (like in a dxt) and anti aliases the edges so they aren't hard.

Vailias

Since this is a one dimensional fade try using 1-((WorldPosition - ObjectWorldPosition)/ a number equaling your object's height in UU) plugged into a component mask for Blue.
That will give a fade from white to black evenly along the height of the object. Used for opacity, it should fade things out as they move up.

Adding in a clamp and an exponent for control should help.

ANd yes Masked is a 1 bit kinda thing. You need translucent for alpha blended opacity



The lines are just generating from a sine and tex coords n stuff.


edit: ok so you just want the pulse to fade in toward the middle and out toward the top?
Use the same setup I have above, but plug the divide node into a cosine rather than 1-x. That will give you a centered gradient falloff.
Just multiply that by your stripe and it will fade in and out over the mesh you have it applied to.