VFX Supervisor Yancy Lindquist shared the first video in a series explaining a technique for smoothly simulating textures across UV islands, no matter their shape or orientation. The method involves simulating a texture that behaves like it's affected by gravity, allowing it to flow naturally over UV islands, even when those islands are separated or rotated differently.
This approach can be used in various situations, such as revealing a second layer of skin or texture on a character, creating the effect of liquid dripping down, and adding stains. Yancy explained that the process combines geometry processing using SOPs and compositing using COPs, along with some custom coding in VEX and OpenCL.
The project files are available for free, and you can follow Yancy Lindquist on LinkedIn to stay up to date as more videos in the series are released.
We also suggest keeping an eye on Julian Bragagna's upcoming tool, which will be featured in SideFX's next free learning project and tech demo, Project Skylark:
