Fireflies...

vandread · February 22, 2003, 3:21pm

i’ve got a nice water sceene and would like to add fireflies to the mix.
i’m thinking particle generations but light tricks might also work.
anyone have a good way to do it?

baboon · February 22, 2003, 5:05pm

Try moddeling a single low poly firefly with an emit value and make it the child of the particle emmiter. Let me know if this works.

vandread · February 22, 2003, 8:11pm

ok i’ll give it a shot.

ATMantis · February 22, 2003, 8:40pm

I’m actually trying to do something like that too, except the particles are in the shape of the fireflies- Is there anyway to set particle shapes so they’re not just spheres?

ray_theway · February 22, 2003, 10:07pm

You could try texturing the halos, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I believe that halo materials are always pointed towards the camera, so you would see a bazillion fireflies moving from the left side of your screen to the right side with no depth . If you activate the “Vector” button in the particles, some random value, and then parent a small firefly mesh to the particle system, you should be able to see the little bugs fly in all three dimensions.

banana_sock · February 22, 2003, 11:11pm

now im not too sure on what a firefly exactly looks like. If it’s just a glowing object, then just use a particle system with a halo material. If you want the actual detail of the fly, then create one, parent it to a particle emitter and put on dupliverts (animation menu, on the left) This will make each particle a firefly, identical to the original. It is then really easy to control the behaviour of hundreds of them.

seval · February 22, 2003, 11:27pm

Since a firefly blinks…creating many from a artcle system would give a strange effect, since they would all be lighting at once. I would suggest making about 6 or 7 fireflies…parent them each to a different emitter.
Set the emitter for one particle with random parameters. Since the flies will be in a different position when they blink, it can give the illusion of many.

Tol · February 23, 2003, 12:50am

I´ve been making some fireflies some time ago and the basic principle is that light from bugs is visible only in night or nearly night time. So halos are not neccesary, actually they have a couple of disadvantages- they are slow and as someone also noticed they point always towards camera.

So I used low poly bug and separated vertices at abdomen of it. For this part I made material with animated emit value. It work fine Of course you can add that halo to simulate glowing too(not in real world, but cool in reel one )-this halo should have low alpha value and also can be animated.

Just sugestion, there are always more ways

Serialsiner · February 23, 2003, 6:04am

Hi Vandread,

Here’s a quick test I’ve done with particles and a halo tex with a noise texture in colorband.

http://www.zoo-logique.org/3D.Blender/animations/Fireflies_test_div4.12.avi

I don’t know if it’s the result you’re trying to achieve but if I can help, let me know.

See y@

Serialsiner.

vandread · February 23, 2003, 8:55am

Serialsiner,

thats kina the affect i’m looking for but random blinking is what i’m going for also
that seems to be the hard part.

this is what i’ve done so far. nothing spectacular.
http://webpages.acs.ttu.edu/jogentry/fireflies.avi

pamtango · February 23, 2003, 10:08am

You could make low power lamps and set ipo to 0 energy and up to your decided full power. Then offset the timing for each of say 4 lamps, duplicate those, arrange and have all follow a curve. They won’t fly as randonmly as you could get with an emitter, but you’d have a lot more control of the light effect.
There are many many ways,
Pam

StratoS · March 10, 2003, 1:11pm

mm i was realy interested in the idea of fireflies,
and since the stuff that came out when i was playing with it looked kind of nifty i thought id share it.

basicly i build a low poly firefly, just like the other person in this topic said, then parented that to a particle emitter and duplicated it.
set the amount of rand to 0.080 and the amount of damp to 0.090 (don’t know if damp influenceses them realy but if it doesn’t hurts?)

then i duplicated the emitter and let that emitter spew out very soft halo’s of a red color. (also the tail piece of the fireflies is emitting and red)

here’s a little divx of how it looks.
i personaly thought it looked very cool, not in a realistic way but more in a animated kinda way. (but i think tweaking the halo and building a better firefly could solve that but i’m no expert by a long long shot)
fireflies divX 475Kb
firefly.blend