There are two approaches that come to mind, but with the complexity of what you are after I am not sure which is going to work better. When you started talking about a squiggly path through a valve, that is starting to push things.
First, you will not be able to have a fluid "push" things. You will have to manually animate the thing you want pushed at the right time. There are "particles" where you can have a stream of little balls flow into a pipe, but I am not sure whether it will be too painful. I can imagine the balls getting stuck/congested near corners, or the performance degrading too much. It will be random in timing as well. So you can look up "particles" and physics ("collide") in the user guide, but I suspect it will be too frustrating in practice.
What I suggest instead is doing something similar to the rod, but with a solid color for the rod and using "clipping masks" in CH. You can have a pipe with two solid walls and put another rod like layer behind it with Transform behavior to position it. You can bend the pipe a bit I think (using draggers), but the original artwork would be a straight line.
Think of drawing your pipes and valves etc with paint on a clear sheet of perspex. You paint over *all* the perspex except inside the pipes. Then imagine having a big sheet of paper behind the perspex - top top half is white, the bottom half is blue. You then pull that sheet from the bottom upwards. The blue will go up the page from the bottom. That is what the effect would look like.
If you need a horizontal pipe, imagine getting a second piece of paper and pulling that one sideways for that section. So you have multiple bits of paper you pull behind upwards, sideways, in whatever direction you need. You time the pulling of them carefully so it looks like one smooth transition. ("Keyframing" in CH can help get the timing right.)
You can make it look a bit more fancy. CH supports "cycle layers" which allows you to draw several images and cycle between them like flipping through a series of images (old style single frame animation). Instead of using a solid blue (or red etc) color, you can have it cycling through with a bit of a pattern on the blue color.
To do a "good" job, you might use a combination, depending on how wiggly the lines are through the valve you mentioned. You can do a cycle layers drawing each step of the blue fluid sequence advancing through the value. You just draw it frame by frame. So long pipes might use the "pull a sheet of paper" approach, short funny paths you might need to draw a series of frames of by hand, then time all the sequences to match up and look like a single flow.
Does that sound acceptable? There is no "fluid" concept in CH that I would trust to do what you need. I mean you could try physics and particles, but I think you will come to grief personally. It will be close but not quite good enough.
10
Replies
AdChoices