Back in Lesson 1003 (Destruction) we looked at destruction of brittle object smashing and how to animate those fragments. Another type of destruction is much more gradual and calls on your knowledge of liquid animation and in some cases, viscosity. We're talking about melting.
Melting is the liquification of a solid object, normally due to heat, which describes the effects we're looking at in this article. We'll look at three main examples of melting starting with a simple example and moving on to two progressively more difficult examples.
The design of your melting effect will depend on the individual situation of the scene, namely the material being melted and the conditions causing the melting. Let's look at the instances listed above and talk about their design in turn.
Two lessons ago we looked at pooling liquid and how simple that can be to animate. The addition here is the ice cube itself which is shrinking in a particular way, depending on how it's being melted.
If the ice cube is on a hotplate, or in a hot pan, the melting takes place from underneath. The top of the ice cube therefore appears untouched by the heat until the very final stages, which gives it the strange illusion of falling slowly through the hotplate.
What if the heat is coming not from the base but from the general temperature of the environment, like on a hot day? The cube melts from all sides as the whole thing is visibly becoming smoother, glassier and smaller. Below is a timelapse video of an ice cube melting in the sun on a concrete path.
video 46_icetl
video 46_iceDesign
A candle is easier in some ways but more difficult in others. The reliable factor is that the heat is always coming from the same place, so the melting happens from that point. However the complexity is in the liquid animation of melting, dripping and then re-solidifying into stalactites.
Candle wax melting has some beautiful and interesting shapes. Let's try to design something that's non-standard.
video 46_candleDesign
I threw this one in as a difficult exercise, but it's mostly about design. The animation will really just draw upon what you already know about various liquid effects.
Before we go any further, you may ask yourself how many times will I really have to animate a plastic toy melting? It doesn't really seem like something you'd need to do regularly, right? Fair enough, but like most effects this is something you can add to your repertoire and call on later when the right scene comes along. It may not necessarily be a plastic toy; what about a bad guy melting? A player death scene in a game? The possibilities with FX, no doubt as you know by now, are quite endless.
video 46_toyMelt
video 46_faceMelt
Just as the design depends on various conditions of the scene, so does the animation. Melting isn't a sudden effect and you'll rarely get a scene that sees realistic melting through from beginning to end, unless it's time lapse or perhaps magic.
For that reason, our animation will show the melting accelerated, so we see everything from start to finish within a few seconds.
video 46_butterAnim
video 46_candleAnim
I'll leave you to work out how to animate the plastic toy example because I'd simply be repeating exactly the same process as in the examples you've seen so far.
Once the design is done, your key drawings are the most important job. As you inbetween your keys, vary the timing to make it interesting and realistic. Ideally, some drops will form and travel faster than others, parts of the object fold over as they soften, and so on.
To take it a step further, why not add a pool forming under the plastic toy, just as you saw with the butter.
Even if you don't see your scenes through to the very end, it's important to think about volumes as you go. Adding tones, shadows and/or highlights to your rough drawings is a good idea and will help you visualise its form and behaviour in context.
This kind of gradual destruction has myriad applications, whether it's just designing a sad, dropped icecream cone, or the face-melting scene of the bad guy in your game or movie. For special cases, you can always use the real world equivalent as your point of reference.
