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As part of my Lightwave learning with the officiacl manual and the tutorials i can find on the net (I also ordered a critically acclaimed book on amazon.com but it hasn't been delivered yet), I am now focusing on volumetrics and particle effects in LW.
I may seem very newbeish to some of you but I couldn't really figure out how ATMOS created the engine and thruster glows in Nova (particularly the flames behind the hellhounds, radar m. & co. (ie.: "traditionnal missiles found in federation space and surroundings). I have tried several times but I couldn't obtain that not-too-glowy-but-just-enough effect. Can anyone help ?
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A few posts back, I answered a question on engine glows in lightwave. Howvver, if you are looking for more, I have had some success with making hypervoxel glows, both as simple motionless objects, and with HV Emmiters (for animations whose rendertime can lengthen into many hours). I tend to get good engine effects if I strech the particles along the z-axis, and use a HyperTexture that extends along the zaxis. I also like to use transparency texture position and falloff to make the edges of the volumetrics more soft and smooth. I have had poor luck using particle meeiters for engine glows in spins, but they can be very useful in flight animationwhere you want dynamic engine glows (if you do it properly you can have an engine flame that turns to smoke, and if you got the money to plop down for one of the Worley Labs plugins (Taft, $200), you can gety a neat heatwave effect, which is really beter suited to atmospheric flight). Well, that is all I have right now, I would love to know Pipeline's engine glow technique... Joe
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Well, hypervoxels werent used too much in making thrusts in nova, as pipeline told me. Most of the time, they used textured cones, or lathes with gradients and fractal transparency maps. hypervoxels were really only used on things like the civilian ships. (url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/zombat/gc/beem.jpg")http://homepage.mac....bat/gc/beem.jpg(/url)
In that image, you can see how I used a simple cone, some transparency maps to make a nice flare (forget all the rest, the beam, the rings, and the text). The valkyrie's was done usuing similar techniques. I'd make a tute on how to do this, if I had more time. (im swamped with dune)
As for smoke trails, hypervoxels work excellently. Usuing a gradien texture, you can make the colors look really great. then you simply use two hypervoxels, one larger, and colored smoke color, you can acheive something like this... (url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/zombat/kabo.jpg")http://homepage.mac....zombat/kabo.jpg(/url)
Perhaps I will make a tutorial. A lot of people are usuing lightwave nowadays...
------------------ Admiral Zombat (url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/zombat/intro.html")Dune(/url) (url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/zombat/tute/tute.html")The Zombula Technique(/url)
While Hypervoxel smoke trails work quite well, using Particle emmiters to produce the same effect often looks as good (or better actually, because of the interactions, you can get some amazing things, especially with the use of the proper plugins, whispy, curley, self intreactive smoke which is quite impossible in Hypervoxels is possible with particles, and renders much more quickly. This method is especailly important in an animation, where the results are at the minimum indistinguishable (look beter if done right), and render times are only a fraction of what they would be using HV3. Joe
------------------ "Life is tough, but it's even tougher when you're stupid." -John Wayne
Thanks for your tips, Adm. Zombat. BTW, I think you should redo the kabo image. The general impression is quite good, but the brown debris are too opaque and dense on the right side of the explosion. This probably wouldn't even be visible in a fast animation but it is very obvious when you look a little closer (and longer) at the shot.
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Originally posted by pesimist_guy: **Thanks for your tips, Adm. Zombat. BTW, I think you should redo the kabo image. The general impression is quite good, but the brown debris are too opaque and dense on the right side of the explosion. This probably wouldn't even be visible in a fast animation but it is very obvious when you look a little closer (and longer) at the shot.
**
Well, it was really just a test... I was simply trying out 'voxels for the first time -- thats what I came up with.