Fluid in a Pipe

[barfart]

Hi,

I'm working on a project for work in which I need to depict fluids (fuel) flowing through a pipe. I could do it with arrows bound to a path but find that this looks too 'busy' on screen when its all moving.
I had in mind a 'pulsing' effect using a colour gradient but the fluid needs to flow around corners following the contours of the pipe as it goes and the gardient would need to repeat (tile ?) within the pipe to achieve this.
Any ideas would be gratefully accepted.

Thanks

Jeff

[Sgaspar11]

You could still use your color gradiant idea.

Just use a mask so the gradiant will only show up in the area of the pipe, and then just use keyframes to rotate and move the gradiant around the corner...

That'd be the easiest way to do it.

Cheers,

Scott

[barfart]

Thanks Scott,

Well I have a suitable effect. I made a 'pipe' with an appropriate fill color and then made a colored rectangle with a gradient fill that goes from the pipe color, to a darker color and then back again. I changed it to a symbol and then motion tweened it to a path so that it follows the pipe. A mask covers up the bits that stick out when it goes around a corner in the pipe. Make a few instances of the new symbol, start them off at different frames - job done, a flow of colored blobs moving down the pipe