Color changes related to movement

[schmoron13]

I just got the call for a new animation for an engineer who wants to show a wood beam bend. He wants it to bend but not split due to the shear forces within the beam. In any case, he wants to use colors to represent the top (compression which is why the beam shortens) and bottom (elongates due to tension).

 

to make a long story short, I want the colors to reflect the amount of tension and compression. I could have sworn this was easy to do, but since I work for an engineering non-profit, I didn't have too much time (none really )to discover the wonders of flex modifiers when doing the tutorials.

 

does anyone have any clue as to how this is done? do I use reactor (have the manual in front of me, but would prefer to know if it'll be a waste of time (relatively) to do ALL the tutorials if I can do it in max instead.

 

thanks in advance,

 

doron

[Jennifer]

Hi,

 

 

Look at the Morpher modifier and it's Morpher Material type. The Chameleon plugin from Digimation can help control the color changes, too.