Tutorial - sparkling magical dust

[Anfiniti]

Hi, im still new to blender but discovered this while fiddling with it, and thought that i should share it.

Start out by creating a regular UVsphere

then, under mesh tools in edit mode, click fractal and turn it up to 90

then create new material and under links and pipeline click halo, zinvert, and onlycast.
press f12 and you should see somthing like this:


you can change the colors and select groups of verticies and move them around to create different shapes.

some examples:




EDIT/UPDATE::Thanks for all the comments and responses. Ive recently been practicing my modelling, and I decded to come back to this and figured out how to animate it.
Instead of creating a UVsphere, create a plane.
add particles to the plane

Then in the particle menu , click on the particle motion tab and under Velocity edit "normal" to be 0.352 and "random" to be 0.880. this creates the particle motion. (press alt a while the mouse is on the modelling plane to preview the animation)

to give the particles the same effect, simply select the plane, create a new material and follow the instuctions i had posted before.
To save the animation as an avi format movie go to render in the top menu, click on render settings and do the following(use the same file destination for all three of #2). Rendering may take awhile.

Exeriment with the options in the particle properties. they effect the speed, distance and direction of the particles.
An example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJXYmc5Uz-U
Higher rsolution: http://www.mediafire.com/?39i2nwmkhbr

[waylow]

nice and quick

[doubled]

Wow! That is a cool trick, thank you.

[ecgilboy]

Yeah thats cool...thanks for sharing...

[blenditall]

Ok, I wouldn't have figured that out.

[Wrightboy]

Wow thanks, this is really awesome.

For an added touch try playing with the halo settings, the size, turn on lines or stars, decrease or increase the number of rings, fun stuff ^^

[mandoragon]

I dont understand how you can create the other effect. Please could you explain?

[ristesekuloski]

WOW! simple, but it looks great! Thanks!

[vliegtuig]

Very nice.
P

[tedi]

hehe - in "oldskool" days of blender 2.28 and 2.30 ... I wrote a script which fiddled the halo settings on a mesh (e.g. sphere), and randomized mesh vertices location and background.

If you linked it onframechanged, it was "automatic" eyecandy desktop background fake spacescene etc. generator. You just needed to cherry-pick the coolest renders.

I rremember "halo puno" setting as being a shortcut to some cool renders ...

[Anfiniti]

Originally Posted by mandoragon I dont understand how you can create the other effect. Please could you explain?

I created that effect by simply cutting a sphere in half and pointing it at an angle towards the camera.

[Gwenouille]

Now that is funny !

I ve done approximately that some time ago.
Here are pics of my tries
I controled the color of the bubles with IPO curves on RGB. They start one color and die another ! can lead to nice results in animations...

[everlite]

Wow, really interesting Can this be applied to a paricle system too?

- Dave.

[MSpace]

very interesting. Do these animate?

[waylow]

Originally Posted by MSpace very interesting. Do these animate?

you can use shapes to animate the verts or keyframe locRotSize

same with the materials

(that's a yes )

[Raigon]

I got a nice pic from the Suzanne model by subsurfing it 2 levels first and then scale it to get a little distance between the vertices.. Here is my screenshot Fun effect to be experimenting with ^^ Maybe usefull for logos and such stuff..

[henriquefz]

Great! Thank you for sharing

[Kristalia]

I know I'm totally new but i got lost at under links and pipeline T_T can't find it

[iliketosayblah]

i hva elready done this technique, in my darkedge, the battleship of the deep thread for the engines, anyone remember? anyway, your way of explaining it obviously makes more sense than mine!

[Midian]

Kristalia: Links and Pipeline is a tab in the materials (Shading) area. If you're not sure what I mean, hit F5, it'll come up. You'll clearly see Links and Pipeline, and there you can find the Halo, ZInvert and OnlyCast buttons.