Running water effect

[garion1]

Hi

I would appreciate any help on how to create the best running water effect, from a tap, in Flash 5.

[pixelwit]

There are as many ways to animate an object in flash as there are styles of drawing. It depends what type of "look" you're going for.

The "best" looking effect would probably be the one that looks the most realistic. If you want it to look real the your best option would be to use some video of running water. If you can't do that then maybe you could tween some still images of running water.

If you don't want photorealism then try watching some cartoons to see how they render running water then borrow their techniques.

Theirs hardly ever an absolute best way to do any one thing.

-PiXELWiT
http://www.pixelwit.com

[JLM]

Garion1

have you spent time looking at a running water comming out of a tap, changing the flow, even tried sketching it. I do not see any evidence that you have really thought about what you are asking, go and turn on a tap and look at it what do you see? Go to another tap and turn it on what do you see? Analysis the problem and then you will be able to ask the right questions.

anyway what I remember seeing when I thought about this and even did some sketches is that for some flows I could do an interesting actionscript representation.
For some simple flows you can see stripes of (reversed) reflection of the background, fat stripes in the centre tailing off to thin at the outside probably some exponetial type thing, often there was also some nonlinear stretching vertically but I think we can ignore that. So the basic idea is to use a mask of the background stretched in strips with a exponential change in width. Now to go further I would need to re look at the tap and my sketches to be sure of what I saw and what approximations I could get away with and any non code stuff like what it looks like as it hits the basin. Do I put a white line down the sides at the side or a dark line or no line, do I alpha the strips and overlap them, do I code them or try to script them...Then I think suger this is not easy can I cheat can I be bothered am I ready for this challenge.

Any way all I was trying to say is analysis what the problem really is break it down as much as possible do the things you can and then ask questions about the areas where you have no idea and also do a search on google!

Don't say how to I make fire in actionscript without building a fire and looking at it first.

Justin