Erosion! First Try

For my major project I decided to make some VFX shots, since that's the stuff I eventually want to do. I teamed up with Oddne again for the animation and modelling and we came up with a (pretty lame) story, of a chess game (told you! Pretty lame). Well, it has been done quite a few times, so the first question we got was: "What makes yours different?" Answer: "F*** knows!" I don't really care for narrative or story(not for my kind of work anyway). I just wanna make cool effects. So rather than trying to tell some sort of story, I'm just gonna concentrate on doing exactly that.

The main idea was that the chess pieces actually come to life and then destroy the other pieces. By 'come to life' I literally mean come to life, as in real-life actors shot on green screen. So now I have to figure out how the transformation from 3D chess piece to real life actor is going to work. Morphing has been done so many times as well, so I try to make something different here.

Erosion, seems like cool idea. The chess pieces erode into the shape of the actor.

TESTING!!! There isn't much to find, internet-wise, on that topic, so I have to come up with something on my own.

I first thought of booleans but that would've been a bit overkill. Displacement maps, I thought would be bit tedious, since I'd have to render everytime I wanted to check. But still It seemed worth a test... and HEY! That actually isn't that bad! Putting the map on a Nurbs plane and checking with MentalRay IPR, makes this a doable job. After playing around with different kinds of noise an turbulence materials and their settings, I found what I wanted.

This is the first test.

The plane next to it is for checking where the displacement map is taking the plane in y axis .

Now it's time to put it action.

Okay, that is kid of what I want. But there are obviously some issues. First: After a certain amount of erosion the object just morphs into a smaller version of itself. Second: How am I gonna integrate the real life footage into the eroded piece? I'm sure I could think of more, but I really don't want to.

Alright then... gotta figure some stuff out.

Laters!