Disney 'Magic Wand' Effect

PhilBo lent me the August 2006 issue of 3D World at the last Michigan Blender meeting and there was a short article on how to make a Disney-style magic wand effect in Cinema 4D. I decided to try my hand in Blender just for fun. :slight_smile:

link

I’m using the Firefox browser under a Linux OS. Apparently there is no plugin for Firefox that will play your video.

Same here …

I’m on Firefox- Windows - no problem playing the video. However, can you point us to the article or jot down your notes for us. The video alone doesn’t teach me anything. Many thanks.

Sorry to those on Linux, here are direct links to the videos.

Uniform particle size

Randomized particle size

I couldn’t find an online archive of the article, but it was very short so I’ll just rewrite it here. Please note that the instructions are for C4D.

Q: How do I create sparkling dust emitted from a magic wand, similar to the effect in old Disney cartoons?

A: In the late '50s and early '60s, Disney’s special effects animation was familiar to everyone. Shimmering water, cascading waterfalls, and the ever-present sparkles from each fairy’s wand helped to give the company’s feature films a signature look. But whereas Disney had to create this effect through painstaking hand animation, thanks to packages such as Cinema 4D, it is now far easier to accomplish a similar looking effect. ‘Disney Dust’ can be created with a touch of simple particle magic with some lens effects added on top.

Usually, lens effects are frowned upon, as they’ve become a major cliche in the industry. However, on occasion, they’re just what the doctor ordered. The set-up for the dust requires an emitter to spray out lights, each of which will use lens effects to give it the ‘sparkle’ we’re looking for.

Create an Omni Light. In the attributes manager, turn on Visible Light and check the No Illumination button. Click on the lens tab to adjust the effect of the light. I started with the glow set to ‘Blue1’ and made adjustments from there. By turning off Use Light Parameters, you can control the size of the effect with the Scale setting. In the file on the CD, this was reduced to 2%. Click the Edit button (under Settings) to make changes to the Lens effect. For a very sparkly effect, make the Size of the Beams large (over 100%), so that they extend beyond the glows.

Create an Emitter, and make the Light a child of it. Make the Emitter a child of the magic wand (or whatever object is distributing the Disney Dust). Double-click the emitter and, in the Attributes Manager, make the Birthrates very high (300 or so). Leave the Speed low (the exact amount varying depending on your scene), as you don’t want the dust to come shooting out. Finally, add a Gravity object that surrounds the entire scene, and then render to complete your task.

Blender doesn’t have visible lights or lens effects, so I just used a lens flare texture I created in GIMP on a simple billboard particle system with negative scene acceleration (gravity) and a bit of random motion. Then I just parented the emitter to the wand, animated it, and rendered.

I like the second one better. Looking cool.

Plays perfectly on linux using mplayer mozilla plugin

How do you randomise the size of particles?

It’s worth playing with the halo rendering functions on this one. There’s a lens-flare function on them, and lots of effects for stars and sparkles.

The problem is that it needs DivX player plugin. That’s the error i get when i try to load it.

There is a rand value right beneath the size value, I simply set this to 1.

Thanks, I’ll try messing around with some halo options. :slight_smile:

Here is the blend for anyone interested: disneydust.blend

Use a pinch of child particle spawn with some brownian motion.