Hello everybody
A little help if you will
I'm animating a web of paper thru a very complex path of rollers and printing modules and I want to show the paper move thru the printer as it "snakes" around rollers and such.
My idea is to use a animated transparency  map and make it look like the paper (think a strip of paper 20 feet long or so), moves thru the printer.

Any suggestions on making it work

yes, it should work with a square alpha map movie, in which a white bar moves from
left ot right (or v.v.).  I don't have any free time to try it myself. the other way is to
animate the UV displacement of a static alpha map, which is easy in the poser
shader tree, but I dunno how to do it in c6pro.  somebody may soon respond with
the correct technique.

If you are not on a Mac this might help:

http://www.sparrowhawke3d.com/BeltDrivePage.html

Not sure as I have not used it myself, but the plug-in author is easy to get ahold of and very helpful to the lists.

wayne k
guam usa

The alpha channel animation is kinda working but it leaves gaps as it progresses thru the rollers. It may be due to being a single surface object.
I'm a retard when it comes to UV mapping, any tuts you know of?

I'd recommend a very long and thin box rather than a plane for this but it should work. Don't forget the tick boxes for totally transparent in the shader.

post a screencap render of the gap area around the rollers, and a wireframe image of same.
I've got a feeling that it's either empty polygons, not using smart backfaces, or
the sheet hasn't got enuff polygons to support bending, meaning a 2-sided plane
will still look the same.  maybe try subdivision smoothing of 6 or more.

BlipTV rules

looks o.k. to me in lo-res shock format.  that should be good enuff to show to
some corporate suits.

If  it were only for weenie consumption I'd draw some stick figures in a power point.
But this is for field engineers and trainers.

Maybe not what you need for your project but I just loaded up Sparrowhawk's belt plug-in.
Easy to use & works well - I think this could work for a lot of things other than belts.

http://3dsplash.com/WayneK/test/final_run.mov

wayne k
guam usa

Thats  close to what I'm looking for, I have the wonderfull Sparrowhawk plugin, I'll need to do little X-spera-mentin to make it work.

 This does work quite well with an animated texture map as well. The best modeler for this will probably be the spline modeler since it takes some of the UV variables out of the process. I can show an example if its helpful.

Looks like I may figured it out
I'd played around with  the spline modeler and noticed that it did what you said with the uv mapping.
Part of the problem is the path is very complex and, web of paper moving through dozens of convoluted twist and turns.

So I needed to be able to use an image of the roller layout to match the paper path., Vertex modeler does it, spline don’t.

**The fix: Use Abode Illustrator to   layout the path on a image layer and import the AI file into the spline modeler.  **

 That's what I'd do. :) No reason not to use Illustrators excellent drawing tools to create that!