Thank you so much @Dr-Sassi -

That's why I love C4D so much - there are so many ways to skin-a-cat and I seem to always finding myself trying to brute-force the most complicated and ineffective way! I wish that I just had time to keep my skills sharp, but the deadlines keep coming faster than my chance to up-skill...

Your solution is elegant and lightweight and with a little moving things around I have it where it is usable for my clients weekly meeting tomorrow (you saved my skin:)

However it does open up even more questions:

With this method is there a way to set the distortion based on the direction of travel of the object? Maybe using a field force?

As you can see I have added a final wipe that creates a full transparency. The idea being that we have State 1=just feet , state2=slightly smeared, state3= really smeared and state4= all gone. Is there a more effective way to accomplish what I have set up?

I completely understand your hesitation to open unknown sources - I have added the reference video and the c4d file and tex folder I tinkered with so you can see what I was trying to get to. Added as a Google Drive link.

Amazing that unseen you got me 80% of the way there - super helpful and I am incredibly grateful for your time.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1x9VpudwNsAN7c0YaCF3ObcEakSOeeLVL?usp=sharing

It it's easier and the answer is already out there (Cineversity archive and Maxon Training teams and school of motion), please point me in the right direction so I don't take up your time.

Hi All,

I have an issue I'm going crazy with:

Objective: Create a transparent texture that is driven by a vertex map that will imitate a mop cleaning footprints from a floor over 3 wipes.

Set up: I have a box field attached to my mop head, as is passes over the floor it is adding to a vertex map so that we have the vertex map increase in strength.

Material: I have 3 transparent png files "feet" - "smudge level 1" - " smudge level2" these are piped into 3 textures using the alpha channel - All good so far.

I have the Vertex Attribute piped in to 4 ramps, each ramp is set to a range so that they are catching 0-25% 25-50% 50-75% and 75-100% -

I'm plugging all this into a Material blender - my base color is a purely transparent texture, my layer 1 is the footprint texture, layer 2 is smudged level 1 footprints, layer 3 is smudged layer 2 and the 4th layer a transparent texture.

The ramps from the vertex map are being used as the blend colours. The first ramp is inverted so that we have footprints all the time and it is only the first mop wipe that clears them and they are replaced my smudge layer 2 so it looks like they have been wiped away badly, this is all working great, but when I try and transition in the same way to layer 3 and 4 I just get a black output... It seams like it will bot process all the opacity but I can not for the life of me work out what is preventing this from working. There are a million tutorials on 2 texture morphing, but I can't get 3+ to work.

I'm trying to repl icate something like this https://wildfirestudios.com/Side-by-Side.mp4 where we get a smear as the mop goes over.

Finally I was planning on stacking this material over the floor geometry so that when it is cleaned, the clean floor is revealed.

I hope this makes some kind of sense!

Thanks in advance for anyone looking at this