I've modeled, shadered (partially) and rigged these tentacle wing things from the character Tyreal from Diablo. The problem is I have absolutely no idea where to even start on actually animating them like they should be. They need to be really fluid, like a wave passing through. Any help on how i could achieve this would be greatly appreciated. By the way, I'm not terribly advanced with the real technical aspects of Maya, so please try to keep things understandable. Thank you.
Heres what i need to achieve... somehow... THE WINGS
One other small thing... I've tried messing around with the glow settings, but i just cant seem to get the glow to be all textured like it is in the link, my glow looks too smooth. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated also.
THANK YOU!
A lot of wave-y motion is just rotating things along the joints by the same amount, moving a dozen frames out and doing it again. You may need to radically ease in and out of the high points on your poses to get a fluid look.
If that doesn't give you the effect you want, you could try applying a simple wave deformer to them, but I'd try messing around with soft bodies. Here are a few tutorials on that:
http://maya3dtutorial.com/blog/maya-tutori...animation-flag/
http://ucbugg.berkeley.edu/files/dynamics/...odyDynamics.pdf
As for the shader question, I know you think it's a "glow", but it's really not. Try using a volumetric shader and a displacement map, maybe? To be honest, I'd apply both that glow and the glow on the tentacles themselves in After Effects. You could grow the alpha and apply the marbled texture to it in there. You could do the same thing frame by frame in Photoshop if you want to test out how it would work. Duplicate the layer, use the Channel Control box to grab the alpha with the wand, increase the area using grow selection and drop the marble into the layer's fill.
-Mary
Okay, thank you very much.
Im not too sure what you mean by the first part, but ill try and give it a shot and see what happens.
Thank you!
