Deep Space 9 Intro

Hi all,

I am quite new to blender. I was used to Lightwave3D and later Cinema4D as a Student, but this is years ago. Blender has quite an impressive development and I really love what you can do now with it still being free, while a lot of other 3D software is quite expensive.

At the moment I try to replicate the first few seconds of the Star Trek Deep Space Nine Intro.

The comet flying through space losing ice particles with the camera flying through those particles.

I made the asteroid quite easy with noise map in blender and animated it, flying along the x axis rotating a bit with the camera targeting it and moving slowly behind it after the asteroid/comet passed the camera. Acutally I am using an empty object as camera target to be slightly behind the asteroid.

This was the easy part.

What I need help with are the particles. I tried several settings and also tried Smoke and a Smoke Flow Force Field. But it doesn’t really look like the one for Deep Space Nine :wink:

Here a reminder how it looks:

Mine looks more like this (the first tries):


It seems like the particles cluster more in the real intro. More like particle clouds …

Do you have tips or hints what you would do to achieve more of the original intro effect? Settings for particles? Smoke? Fluid or flame physics? Combined Smoke + Particles?

Thx a lot :slight_smile:
Sven

Start my making an object like this one around the comet (the comet is at the location of the cursor).


For the smoke, you can use this material and animate it over time by animating the Location parameter(s) of a Vector Mapping node.
For the particles, use the particle system you have but with a lower density.

Thx :slight_smile:

I will give it a try.