I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask about this as it’s very specific, but I’m not sure where else should I ask. The blender(help) subreddits aren’t very helpful to be honest.
You can see below what I intend to recreate using eevee (not cycles, very important). Now, it doesn’t look that bad, but it’s kinda dry, and I was hoping to give the core a bit more “umpf” by adding those little energy emissions coming from it that you can see faintly, but I don’t know how. So far I’ve been only using materials and a particle system to get the results you see below. So I was thinking of maybe using a fire+smoke simulation to get better results, where the core would be a white ball of fire, and the emitted smoke those energy thingies. But I don’t know how. Or maybe you have better ideas to solve this problem. So any help is greatly appreciated!
FWIW: your effect seems flat, 2d-ish. I think you want a more spherical appearance to the energy waves. Expanding spheres with an evolving texture (this might be a place for ‘world coordinates’, you get moving textures for free.) There also seems to be a texture on the surface of the ‘real’ thing, like a caustic fog.
Any tips/ideas on how make that? And yeah it does look kinda flat, because I’m using a layer weight node in the shader, and that’s because I’d want to see a ring from whichever direction I’m looking at it, to create this effect. Also, what exactly do you mean by evolving texture? And moving texture? Those are really broad terms.
I’d do some experiments with volume shadows. if you had a volumetric glow around the core, especially with those rotating rings casting shadows into the volume, you’d get a better sense of the depth of the energy.
Evolving textures are textures with animation kinda implicit in them, or tht have a setting animated to make them (smoothly) ‘evolve’.
Expanding (or any kind of movement) a sphere thru a 3d texture with (sorry, don’t remember the Blender term) ‘World Coordinates’ results in the surface of the sphere appearing to have motion on it --iow, the texture is connected to the world, and the mesh moves thru it.
I’m actually already doing that to make the particles fade out as they grow. Since I’m using eevee, I cant use the particle info node, so I have a spherical gradient texture that’s fixed to world coordinates, and when the particles grow into it, they fade away. But I don’t know how I could use this method to add more energy to the core.
I think the original effect isn’t done with particles, i think it is done w/ growing, mostly transparent, spheres.
I’m also using spheres. And I’m using a particle system to constantly emit those spheres which also grow as they age.