I’ve designed a couple of ships and wanna make them fight. I’m in the process of trying out different weapons and this is the first one I’m running into problems with:
The lazer beam is made from a particle system that has it’s Norm value to the highest setting (2.000) - Yet I think this is too slow. Also, in this clip, the ship is stationary but when it is in flight the particles are affected by the ships speed and get pushed back… any suggestions as to how to better achieve this effect?
I’ve spotted a mistake in that the particle system running the thrusters at the rear come through the object the wrong way (if you look closely you can see this just after the ship fires)… How do you control this?
Another mistake is that the stars are too close to the camera and appear to be space particles rather than stars… I will increase the distance from the camera next time.
For the speed, make a linear time IPO with a steep slope.
For the object / particle speed, make sure the ‘OB’ slider is set to 1 (if i’m interpreting this correctly, the ship is outracing the particles?)
I’m still not sure about the backwards particle effect myself, but I’ve noticed that something causes the reversal of the stream when the force on the particles is too high. lower your forces and see if it helps. Use a time IPO if it gets too slow.
Another thing you might consider is scaling down your entire scene. This will make the particles appear to go faster as well.
talion, I’m not entirely sure what you mean (I’m still learning)… I’ve parented an emitter to the front of the ship that has a single vertice. The emitter is giving out icospheres that have a halo texture. I’ll try what you’ve said but I’m not feeling too confident!
looks good - lighting, the fast moving stars… i just wouldn’t call that laser beam - more a plasma spewer or something. a laser beam should always be a straight beam (cylinder) with a cool glow effect. i’d make the core white and the glow in the color you want the laser to appear (green for the bad guys ). you may need post-processing to achieve that effect.
Indeed it is! Doh! I forgot to change the wmv bit to mov… have done so now! My apologies!
looks good - lighting, the fast moving stars… i just wouldn’t call that laser beam - more a plasma spewer or something. a laser beam should always be a straight beam (cylinder) with a cool glow effect. i’d make the core white and the glow in the color you want the laser to appear (green for the bad guys ). you may need post-processing to achieve that effect.
Good call on the lazers… I didn’t really think about what type of weapon it was, just that it was different to a normal lazer effect… I could do with a bit more colour in there so I’ll have a go at that next time.
I don’t know if you know this already, but if an emitter has a halo texture, it is applied to the particles, you don’t need to emit dupli’d meshes.
I did know that but I had lines on my halo and I wanted them to rotate as the blast went off. I couldn’t seem to get this to work so I had to make dupliverted icospheres and spin the parent. Therefore they all spin in the same way which is not really what I wanted but looks okay. Is there another way to make the particles rotate?
Also, I’ve been trying to make an asteroid field but can’t seem to figure out how to make particles different sizes… any suggestions?
make three or more different “potatoes”, and apply some sort of random rotation with extend mode set to extrapolation.
then make as many particle emitters as potatoes (asteroids) and parent each asteroid to an emitter. set particle count down (20-40), start & end values according to your animation (end should be set past the end of your animation, also extend the asteroids life to make sure they don’t disappear.
i made a quick hack to verify what i’m saying, and it looks quite ok. tweak the settings for good results
Nice one Solmax… I thought there might be an easier way but never mind!It doesn’t half slow up the computer! Ouch! I just rendered a small bit (it took about an hour!!!)… http://www.z7.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/asteroid_field_test.mov (496KB)
It’s four emitters throwing out four different “potatoes” and another four emitters throwing out red smoke! What do you think?
I have a couple more questions:
Is it possible to duplivert a particle emitter? If so, how? This would be good for giving each asteroid a firetrail.
How do you go about making something dissapear out of sight? I’ve made this asteroid field as long and as thin as I can and have put a camera on the end of it with the intention of getting it to dissappear into the distance. I’ve put the camera’s ClipEnd up to it’s max (5000) and it just doesn’t look right… any suggestions welcome!
Also… What is the best way to light a scene like this? At present I’ve just stuck a huge spot lamp in the direction of the camera???
hm, lighting in space - if you want a realistic scenario (within the range of a sun) i’d use one lmap to simulate the bright light coming from the sun, and some ambient lighting - just to make sure the shadowed parts are not completely black. ich you choose the “right” camera angles, you’ll have som pretty high-contrast space scenario.
i just wouldn’t call that laser beam - more a plasma spewer or something. a laser beam should always be a straight beam (cylinder) with a cool glow effect. i’d make the core white and the glow in the color you want the laser to appear (green for the bad guys 
). you may need post-processing to achieve that effect.