Help: Animation problem

[Nate Owens]

The only reason this is a problem is because I do very little animation.
The drawing below is a simplification of what I need to do.

Here's what happens:

1. Water begins flowing through a pipe (I don't need anything as complex as snazzy shaders or even particles... this is pretty much an animated diagram)
2. The water floats a ball up which closes off another opening.

My problem (I told you, it's too easy)
How to change the level of the water in the pipe over the duration of the animation. I can't just change the diameter of the water (cylinder) because it has to stay inside the pipe. Changing just the y direction would also distort the shape of the water inside the pipe.

I know you animation wizards have this down pat... I am still scratching my head... need some ideas on this one!!

Thanks!

[Hugo]

Can you animate a boolean inside carrara ?
Make the water inside the two pipe, then apply a boolean (a basic rectangle) moving from the bottom to the top and put the ball as a child for the move to the top.

[Varsel]

It might be done with morphs.
Create one of the waterlevels, and create a morph to the other level.
Here is an other quicky....

A second way, that is very diagram-ish is to create the waterlevels from low to high, as seperate objects, Giving each one a seperate shader (same color)
and animate the alpha chanel so they replace each other.

[Nate Owens]

Thanks...

It appears that booleans do not animate in carrara

@ Varsel - that looks cool, but you went over my pea-brain head with this alpha channel business...

What someone else did that worked was to animate using a spline cylinder, changing the points at each keyframe. His sample is here: http://homepage.mac.com/uvavoo/Doc2.mov It looked great, but I can't get it to work. I can animate the spline cylinder fine by modifying the length in spline modeler, but modifying points is something I can't make work...

Here's a sequence of what I did... the carrara file is zipped if that helps.

I appreciate your good advice... I will try to learn more about the animation stuff - I hardly ever do it. I may end up doing this with flash - but the Carrara would be better. I'm using 6.03.

again... thank you!

[whkguamusa]

one more way to do it

wayne k
guam sua

[Nate Owens]

Thanks Wayne...

I'll have fun figuring this one out!

[Varsel]

Nate :
When creating key frames, you have to make them in the masterobject.
First I selected the masterobject in the animationtray, and then created a keyframe. Then I altered the splineobject.
To finetune it: slide the timeline to the new position, make sure the materobject is still selected and then create a new keyframe.

Wayne :
Where is this tool. That is great, didn't know we had something like this in Carrara.