How do you make an energy blast in blender 2.6 and up?

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

I tried making a tube, and giving it an emission surface, but it didn’t cut it. I’m not exactly good with particles, and I really don’t know how to use them to make a full out anime style energy blast. Can someone make a tutorial or something?

2

Care sharing some kind of reference for what you are trying to achieve

An ‘energy blast’ can mean a 1000 different things to 1000 different people.

3

This is what I’m talking about, an attack based blast made in cycles.


4

You can get that effect in the compositor.

5

How? A tutorial would help.

6

You may give an object a material, then disable shading, disable ‘recieve’ (under options), and ‘traceable’ (under shadow). You then render the image. Go to the compositor, at the bottom of the compositor you’ll see 3 icons, a checkered icon, a circle, and a small cylinder and sphere. Click the middle icon and toggle ‘use nodes’, 2 nodes will appear, the render and composite node, in between those 2 nodes you can add a “filter>blur” node and a “filter>glare”. (go to the bottom tab and click on add, or press shift-A)
The basic principles applied here are that at the start of this “assembly line” you have your render, then you can add nodes which can adjust color, contrast, brightness, even add some glare and blur not just to your whole overall rendered image or scene but to individual object too.
This effect was made using an elongated white sphere with shading disabled, and the above process.

energy projectile.png960×540 12.8 KB

7

Search for “Blender lens flare tutorial”, that should show you how to the compositor to do most of the work. Although you’ll probably want to learn about Halo materials, there are some good tutorials on how to do a laser e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrQTzJI9688.

8

Thanks guys, I’l look into these!

9

blast test.blend (1.09 MB)

burst example.jpg1564×962 401 KB


Sure you could do it in the compositor with a little help from the tracker. If it was video footage I would track the hand emitting the blast then animate a circle texture (2D) with Plane Tracker distortion (2D), but I gave up and used 3D for the beam effect. I could have used a mask though :wink: