How to mortar bricks

[ned]

Any ideas on how to put the mortar between bricks as a house is being built.

The bricks fly in and are stacked along a course left to right. Then another course flys in brick-by brick and makes a second course. As the bricks are laid, I need to have mortar appear in the joints between bricks. The mortar doesn't have to be animated, just suddenly appear is fine.

We have tried having a second layer for each brick that's slightly back from the brick's front surface. This layer has a mortar texture and color and when the brick is laid, the surface becomes visible.

It looks OK but not great.

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

[WCameron]

Maybe a layer of points with Hypervoxels on them that sort of bubble into being as the bricks move in...

- Will.

[bloontz]

Might be able to use a morph to have the mortar grow vertically.

[ingo]

Some pictures may help us a bit more. Otherwise i would use a premade wall which is slightly thinner than the bricks and grows with the time.

[HowardM]

oh you gotta animate it with HVs! that would look SWEET!
:p

[WCameron]

need a quick way to get lotsa points between all the bricks though.

- Will.

[SamuraiSlayer]

particle emitter, wind effector... some tweaking, trial and error...

:)

[lardbros]

another option would be to have the mortar on a separate layer and use an animated clip map to move on the vertical axis (Y), maybe this isnt what you're looking for but its another option!

To be honest the HV idea sounds sweet, would look ace all the mortar kinda growing between the bricks!!

Not sure there's a particularly quick way of creating points along the bricks really. Either select the points by hand, copy them an then move them up to the next layer of mortar. Then you have two layers of points to copy and move up, each time you'll double the amount you are copying... just a matter of selecting the first layer of them really!!

Hope this makes some sense!
Good luck

[HowardM]

well it depends on how you want the mortar to appear?
along a path, down the lines? or in large patches? or all at once?

you can take your mortar polys and make them an emitter, with no movement on your pfx. theres a few ways you can bring them on, all at once or along a path.

or you could draw a spline in modeler, using the points from the mortar, and save out a motion, which can be used with an emitter to drop mortar along a path...

many ways to do it!
;p