Hyper Voxel project...need help

[bonnieezzell]

I need to make a small sand box that when the wind blows on it really strong, the sand particles blow away to expose the subtle shape of a face..

I have a head model, and I have a ground plane I can use later to do some sand wrinkles with morphs...that's not my worry

I am getting frustrated with not knowing how to make the sand be filled up first, then get blown away to expose the face...I tried playing around with the emitter, but I can't seem to get enough grains of sand/particles to make it look anywhere near a box of sand, lol...

Does anyone have good emitter settings for this? Will I still have to add wind collision? I figure that I will have to run the video backwards to make it look like it's getting blown away, unless someone knows how to make the settings to where it's full at first frame and then blows away? I will be taking the final footage in to Nuke or After Effects if I have to for any additional fx, but for now, I need to make a whole bucket load of sand and make it blow away!! HELP

[nickdigital]

I don't think trying to make a box full of actual sand particles is the way to go. Doing a reveal/wipe on an object with some emitters at the top to simulate sand blowing away is probably more do-able.

[bonnieezzell]

uumm....ok, i have never attempted that i don't think...how do you do a wipe/reveal? do i make a morph first? how does a wipe make it look like sand blowing away, or will i still need to add those effects? thanks :D

[nickdigital]

The reveal would be something like this clip map reveal trick. It's the Clip Map Cut Away tutorial.
http://www.md-arts.com/tutorials/lw_tutorials/tutorials.html

I'm just thinking out loud so I don't know if this will actually work. If you do a morph the texture will move with the morph so it'll look like the hill is changing shape, not being erased or blown away.

What I'm proposing isn't going to be an accurate reproduction of what you want. It's more about putting separate elements together to give the illusion of what you want.

Have a wipe/reveal on your sand mound to get it to erase. Then with some carefully placed emitters that move along with the reveal, it'll look like particles are being blown off the hill.

[nickdigital]

Actually if you do the morph thing and set your texture to World Coordinates your object should animate through the texture. The morph route might be worth going for. You could then make a version of that object where the top polygons are particle emitters so as the object morphs the top emits particles. Again, just thinking out loud. This may or may not work.

Good luck with this one.