I’m looking for some help with a project in which I have spherical glass water tanks in the 3D world in which the water “level” must change over time. 

Originally, I created a slew of different pre-generated partial sphere sections to represent the different levels and I swap them in and out of the glass tank containers as their levels change. 

BUT, is there a better way?  I’d love to simply create a cylinder of water that’s automatically masked such that only the part of the cylinder INSIDE the tank shows and the rest remains un-rendered/hidden.  I’ve played around some with alphaThreshold and various blendmode options, but nothing is hitting the magic formula.

Is this even doable?  Is there another, better way? Or should I stick with my original approach?  I’m still a newbie with a lot of 3D stuff, so pardon my stumbling in the dark.

Andy

Hi,

First thing that comes to my mind would be to use a keyFrame animation for the water mesh : frame 0 would be “empty” and frame 100 “full”

You would then pause the animation and just set its playhead according to how much water the tank holds. That means being able to export to MD2 I think, have only used bones animations so far so can’t help on that part but that’s probably the road I would explore first.