procedural animated texture ?

[vahl]

hey guys, I'm trying to create a procedural alpha texture, somehow like doom3's thing when you kill the demons, just not over all the body, any idea where I could find a (free?) generator or something like that (maybe tutorials for photoshop) to create that ?

thanks /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[JordanW]

I think something like this would typically be done with just a normal procedural greyscale image (created in something like allegorithmic mapzone) and then in code they use it as a mask going through th levels. Kinda like photoshop's threshold adjustment.

[Rob Galanakis]

You can make a plane, apply Noise to it, and animate the Time or Seed or whatever in your program of choice to animate it, then just render it to frames.

[MoP]

[ QUOTE ]
I think something like this would typically be done with just a normal procedural greyscale image (created in something like allegorithmic mapzone) and then in code they use it as a mask going through th levels. Kinda like photoshop's threshold adjustment.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, this sounds like pretty much the way we do it.

[Eric Chadwick]

I've done this too. We have a reveal effect for units that starts in the center of their bodies and travels outwards to their tips, pretty cool. We set up a Falloff map in 3ds Max that uses another mesh as the center of the gradient (positioned in the center of the unit), and we added some 3D noise to the gradient. Then we bake that 3D falloff intoa bitmap using the unit's UVs. A runtime shader uses the map for alpha test (1bit alpha/clipmap/sprite/etc.), animating the threshold amount.

[CrazyButcher]

and if you need render-to-texture of procedurals that must tile, use a torus as basemesh (as Eric would tell you)