FX shot for a movie I am going to act in in a month or two. The animation isn’t quite ready, but suggestions on the basic energy ball would be deeply appreciated.
Keep this up and you’ll be like Colin Lister (cogfilms.com)
The basic form, texture, and lightning is spot on, but there is some small energy spikes repeating over and over, maybe fix that.
The waves going out from the ball? Or the actual spikes coming out of the ball? The spikes weren’t repeated. They’re just… spikes. But the waves on the edges do repeat. They’re basically being emitted from the ball through via particles with a halo material. The halo’s have halotex enabled, but it seems like it just repeats the same mapping of the texture for each vertex. And… I don’t know how to fix that.
Using textures on halos on a dense verticie field has pretty much been full of suck since before Blender 2.25 because of that. It’s impossible to get good texture effects on halos because of that.
You’re better off using a particle system with the visualization set as a camera facing billboard, UVmap a halo blend texture to the billboards, set it as an alpha stencil, and use any texture to want for an alpha and color map.
Billboards allow for really neat looking volumetric effects and will continue to allow that as long as the Sim_physics volumetrics aren’t officially in trunk.
Sweet. Is that done in blender? How did you do the awesome wavy electrical looking things, is that a node texture or particles or something? BTW you can fix the particles looking the same by making them emit an object, and then giving the object a global texture so that it varies.
Really nice job looks great except the noise around it.
Yeah. The hand wasn’t made in blender though. It was basically all just nodes. A sphere emitting particles, some halos, and some torus type things surrounding the sphere. Then just keep adding nodes until it looks good. Renders in about 19 seconds per frame on my computer, so fairly reasonable for making quick school projects and stuff.
Okay. I’ll try using some billboards. I still don’t know really how to do particle stuff unless I’m following someone’s tutorial exactly. Practice and more practice, I guess.