How to color an object when touched by animated character? I have a fbx with a character performing a dance animation which lasts for about 20 seconds. So basically I want to create a grid like floor which defaults to being black but when the character steps on a tile it lights up for a split second and moves onto the touching tiles kind of like the rgb keyboard ripple effects that you can get. How would I approach this and how would they create the ripple effect of colour.
This sounds right down the alley of dynamic paint.
To get a tile to light up, I recommend using an image canvas with single pixels for each tile, and when it goes into the material, set the interpolation to nearest neighbor (no interpolation). As for the wave effect, that should be fairly easy as well with a second canvas set to wave. In the floor shader, you can use the light from the first canvas to control the appearance of the waves from the second so they don’t go outside the lit tile.
I have not tested this.
For more information, check out dynamic paint in the physics section of the manual at docs.blender.org