TUTORIAL AS QUOTED FROM SOURCE

...any chance you could just explain how i could go about making textures like in "cog is revealed" it looks like an animated water texture coloured yellow in the alpha channel? also the textures used in the "temporal portal" thanx for the inspiration.... Manwich

Following a reply from a forum request I thought it would make a nice Cog's Quick Tutorial. So here it is.

The 'cog is revealed' concept used some special textures derived from the marble procedural texture in Blender.

This was created by animating the marble textures ofZ in the material IPO. I also masked each side of the marble to produce a single line. The resultant avi movie is mapped to the surface of the cube as an emit.

An alpha mask movie was also created in a similar manner using the marble texture but with a white mask on one side of the transition. OK I know there is a lot of complex principles and techniques here but its actually quite simple. A little experiment that should explain better than words:-

1. Create a plane in the top viewport.
2. Move your camera to location X and Y 0, and Z 2. Set the rotation of camera X,Y,Z to 0.
3. From the camera settings switch to Ortho and adjust until the plane fills the view. Adjust the render size to give equal width and height.
4. Create a Shadless material with a marble texture with all standard settings and map it to the plane.
5. Adjust the colours of the material to your liking. I have just used black and white.
6. In one of the views select the IPO window and select the material ipo for texture 0 (the marble texture slot)
7. Create an ofZ from 0 at frame 0, to 200 at frame 100.
8. From the curve menu select Extend Mode and then Extrapolation. (This will make the animation constant throughout.
9. Now render a short animation 100 frames will do.

You will notice that the marble tracks diagonally across the plane and that the marble is 45 degrees relative to the camera. Therefore to produce a vertical wipe rotate the camera by 45 degrees and enlarge the plane so that the camera doesn't see any of the edges of the plane. To mask off unwanted areas of the wipe I used another plane above this one with a simple blend alpha and ipo-transitioned it to ensure only a single line of the marble is seen. Quick and dirty, but it works.

The temporal wake uses similar techniques. A cloud texture with an ofZ ipo animation and a Blend sphere alpha produces an animated texture that is mapped to a plane.

You can also create a repeating texture by taking the above animation into the sequence editor and duplicating and offsetting each with a dissolve so that the derived animation repeats.
In my temporal portal I have used some additional textures to create the lift door opening. Hope these explanation help.

The film is dedicated to my great friend Roger Finch who tragically died in 2003. Roger was an inspiration to many non-professional film makers encouraging them to dream, persevere, and achieve the impossible.