How to do a burning wick or a  radial energy bar for example.?

Essentially a mask is what I'm after here. How can I mask over time? . I thought I might be able to use an alpha mask but it seems I cant animate them over time. Is there another way to do this? Essentially I'm looking for how to remove parts of a mesh over time; other examples might include and argy bar graphic that fills up over time, a radial bar that decreases etc..

In my case I'm trying to gradually burn down a candle wick.

Any ides?

You could try an animated (video) Opacity texture - I don't know if that's possible, but that's the first thing I would try...

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See all the G-Tools Plug-Ins available for iClone here: G-Tools Plug-Ins

2 ways to do this - 

First,  any parameter that's green can be animated - that said,  almost all textures can be animated 

2nd the opacity map takes video -  this is probably the best approach for what you are trying to do - for example you can make an opacity map in a video editor of a real candle,  then apply it as a b/w video opacity map on the texture.

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Thanks. My candle needs 15 minutes to burn down and so I couldn't really have a 15 minute video just for this. How would I go about animating the green (screen?) approach? I didnt quite understand this.

Cheers

the resizing approach may not be practical for this effect -  because while the image gets smaller,  it also begins to tile
this effect is useful when you want to spin things ,  not shrink them.

The video approach is the best-  but the 15 minutes of animation may be a deal breaker as rendering anything for 15 minutes from iclone can be challenging.  This may be something you want to fake on a video editor,  vs real time animation software.  ie -  render a candle stick and shrink it over time,  then have a flame follow.

this is also one of the hardest things when starting with iclone,  having an idea that's bigger than the software can handle hehe,  been there!! 

which btw,  that said,  a 3rd way to pull this off -  is simply having a candle model,  and shrinking it over time -  but again,  that 15 min goal is not easy. 
I only render 10 second segments now to avoid instability.  -  you can certainly do more than that,  but the larger the file,  the more prone you are to instability,  at 15 minutes -  your next post might be "why can't I open my file ?"  hehe

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If the candle is sitting on a surface (table, etc.) just animate the candle moving down in the Z-axis over time (one transform key at beginning and one at the end).  The bottom will 'disappear' into the table and it will just look like the candle is getting shorter.  As mentioned earlier, a 15-minute clip is FOREVER in iClone time -- you will most likely need to render this in short clips and assemble in video editor.

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In the end I managed to figure it out
I used an alpha mask  (half white half black) made it twice as tall as the main diffuse texture and then simply moved the V offset in the UV over time.

Here is the result: https://youtu.be/KtLZb_aJlcA