I need help recreating a specific effect

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
#1

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!

#2

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.

#3

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.

#4

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.

#5

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.

#6

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.

#7

I think the original effect isn’t done with particles, i think it is done w/ growing, mostly transparent, spheres.

#8

I’m also using spheres. And I’m using a particle system to constantly emit those spheres which also grow as they age.