Hello and thank you for your time,

Kind of working on an idea like this great BBC animation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryrXAGY1dmE

In between 0 to 30 seconds , you can see the Earth’s crust, spreading apart at the fault seam, and then colliding as one layer sinks underneath another layer.

Was planning to use geometory to show the Earth’s crust with both events happening (sinking under and splitting apart at the seam)

What would be the best way in your view to model/animate this using modifiers? Seams splitting, and then growing apart?
I’m thinking of starting off with a box, fairly subdivided, then applying some modifiers to get what I want, then a bend modifier to round to so it matches the earth.

Thanks for your help!
D

XP Pro x64 SP2.
Xeon Quad Core x2 @ 2.33GHz, 4Gb RAM, 4Gb Swap, DX9.0c.
NVidia Quadro FX 4600 768MB
Forcewear 97.68

Outdated gear

Not sure your approach is correct.

From the vid, it looks like the whole of that first 30 secs is done with static geometry; the only thing moving is the textures (and possibly a displacement map). The actual 3D form of the two bits of crust stays the same throughout, with the animated textures giving the impression of movement.

Trying to animate geometry to give a similar effect would be tricky. If you insist, you’ll probably be needing to deform the crust with spacewarps so you can move the geometry through the distortion / bend.

I’m not too hot at texturing so someone may be able to chip in with a better idea, but my approach would start at the modelling end of things - I’d model the crust as a flat block, apply the UVW map, then use bend mods to bend it into a curved / spherical shape. Then, rather than animating the UVW mapping, just animate the texture offsets from within the Material Editor. The textures will stick to the surface even after the bends.

It all depends on camera angles really, and how much of the earth’s curvature is in shot…