Jet / Rocket exhaust effect

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

Hi all,

I put together some jet/rocket exhaust using the displace tutorial from blender mag #9, some simple particle smoke for a contrail, and a glow node for the rocket flame. I’m posting it here in case someone can get some use out of it.

The actual flame of the engine is an open-ended cylinder with 2 textures applied. The flame color and gradient is a blend texture that is UV mapped along the side of the cylinder. It provides Color, Alpha, and Emit input. The second texture is where I got tricky - it’s a clouds texture mapped to Nor (and given a value of 10 for drastic bump mapping) and Alpha. The Alpha channel makes the flame more irregular. Then I created an IPO curve for the Clouds texture’s Offset, so that it moves out in the direction of the rocket exhaust over time. Repeated (because you can’t have more than a 10 to -10 offset), this creates a flickering flame effect without needing to mess with particles.

Attachments

rocket.blend (711 KB)

2

nice! I was trying to do something like this, but now I don’t have the time to put it into my movie any more, since most of the movie’s already rendered… :frowning:
I think the right part (the particles) glows too much though…, not sure.

3

its just the sort that i want!!! fantastic simulation but I am confused… i want to create a game that uses spaceships, the exhaust fumes would have to follow the spaceship. is that easy? any help would be great but yeah i know i will look in the help forums…

thank you in advance!!!

4

here is one of my little secrets, if you want better looking smoke, instead of using the clouds texture, use the ‘blend’ texure and have the darker parts of the quad facing away from the light. you can achieve a very nice look with this technique