text effect-letters forming out of mercury?

[thetatorment]

i need to do a text effect where the letters of a word form out of mercury.any ideas how to? hypervoxels assigned to emitters or something? anybody kow how to make mercury in HV? is there a preset somewhere? any input would be appreciated!!

[Suede]

Hi, under Generic tab, hypervoxel presets, there is mercury.
As for the making part I would do a spline forming the letters then use an emitter following it with the CurveConstraint (motion options)

[Dangerman]

If I understand your question (cool idea), here's how I'm guessing it could be done.

1) Model the lettering. The top surface is bound to have no points, so you'll probably need to use ______ to create a grid of points there. (I can't remember the command to do this, but it's there, I'll see if I can find it and repost).
Save this in a layer somewhere, in case you need to make changes.

2) Kill the polys.

3) Put this in a layer somewhere (it will be a morph target).

4) Use set value to flatten these points in the y plane. This will be your base object (where all the mercury has flowed together).

5) Create a morph map from the flattened points. Select and drag outward clumps of points and do a little random scattering. This will be your morph target before the flow together part.

6) Use bkgd to morph to create a morph map using the original points before flattening.

7) in Layout, set your scattered morph at %100 and your final morph at %0. Then as you slide the morph sliders to the opposite ends, you will see the points flow together and extrude out. (You'll have to decide when to start the extrude out (final morph), if it's even necessary).

I'm not sure how you apply HV's to the points, but I think it's doable ... just choose the mercury preset and you're ready to tweak/animate.

Post up whatever you do, this sounds cool!

[Dangerman]

The command I was thinking of was "Stipple" BE CAREFUL though.
Check that the settings are sane before you you hit the 'OK' button. The first time I stippled something, I had to kill modeler 6 hours later cause the model was big and the stipple point distance was small so it was generating trillions of tightly spaced points.