Graphics: engline glow

Anyone knows how to do those decently in C4D?

On the whole I'm doing ok in C4D for ship-making (well, my texturing suck, but that's an other issue). One thing I just can't get even a little right is engine glow. Nothing I've done looks even close to the EVN effect... and I've tried quite a lot of stuff, from simple transparent shapes to masses of glowing particules. Would anyone who managed it well have tips on how to do it? I'm using C4D 9.6.

Thanks.

The Werhner Way:

Make the ship, add the engine glow (volumetric flames for me), set the engine glow to perfect black, with 0 light produced and no shadows cast (both are options I can set with my renderer). Render the image; it should look like the ship when no engines are firing in Nova. Spin it. Now you have the base.

Next, make the ship perfectly black, with 0 reflection and transparency. Set the engine glows to their appropriate color (orange-red for me). Keep the light emitted at 0 and let no shadows be cast. Render the image. It should look like little points of light with no sign of the ship itself showing up. Spin the image. If you have any inclination of the camera (looking at the ship other than straight down), the flames might change shape as parts are eclipsed by the black body of the ship. Again, I think it is imperative that the ship never is seen, or else strange artifacts will appear in Nova when the ship's engines engage.

Shield glows and weapon glows work the same way. The point is to only show the desired elements to the camera when they are to be shown. Don't show engine glow when you are doing the base, and don't show base when you are doing the engine glow.

Ok, wasn't clear enough

My problems isn't exporting it to a shän; I use a technique very similar to what you are describing and it works fine. My problem is with the flames themselves. There's no volumetic flames that I know off in C4D and the various other technics I've tried don't look good. I suppose I need a C4D user for that one...

You may want to inquire at Just Graphics.

@mrxak, on Oct 20 2006, 01:53 AM, said in Graphics: engline glow:

You may want to inquire at Just Graphics.

I realised that forum existed later... I'll do that next time. Anyway, Modesty_Blaise gave me a few tips which solved it.

Cool. I don't really see a problem with questions regarding graphics here, and there's quite a bit of overlap in viewership, it's just that most of the expertise is concentrated there.

I've tried several approaches; I typically get best results using transparent cones with glow on them. The key is to have at least as much inner glow as outer glow, so you don't see the cone-shape.

Playing around with fog textures can also produce some interesting results.

I used an orange-yellow spot light, stuck it in the engine cone, and set it to have some sort of fog to make the light visible. To change the flare size, change the light intensity, I think. I don't remember perfectly, because I haven't used C4D in a long time.

Heh, Blender is excellent for this; I model a cone-ish thing out of a cylinder, but make it have no point. Then I use a "distort" function or something like that that randomly misplaces the vertices up to a certain level. Then I grab some random vertices and pull them back and forth on the Y axis (or the Z axis in C4D... I don't know why blender does it differently), and copy that object several times, using larger ones on the outide and smaller ones on the inside. I set transparency levels and color in the materials settings to something close to what I like them, use a little bit of glow on the inner ones, and put a light in the "hottest" point of the flare. It's pretty easy to animate it, too, just keyframe a little bit of a size change back and forth (or if you know some better animation tactics than keyframing, do it that way), and keyframe a bit of a flicker into the light. You could also stick a particle emitter in there to simulate smoke, but I don't think it's needed unless the ship is supposed to be burning up the last of their fuel reserves or some other dramatic effect like that.

I suppose this doesn't fit the DC, but I kind of got caught up in the moment.

I usualy use a paralel spot with visible light on. Lokks very nice.