Hi, im quite new to blender and i got a little problem:
How can i create the animation of an spaceshuttle power field? Like those in Star Trek for example. I tried to do this with particles but that didnt went right. It looked like fireworks or yust like a normal light. Is there another way or am i yust doing something wrong with the particles?
Thanks a lot,
Blendguy
Well IIRC most of the time those shields were only visible when hit by some sort of weapons fire. Therefore, I’d use ramps to create the hit place on an elongated sphere and have the ramp’s alpha go towards 100% as you leave the point of contact.
Try this:
Make a sphere that covers you whole model
Make an empty (let’s call it ShieldHit). Place it someware on the surface of the sheld. We’ll come back to it shortly.
Make the sphere completely transparent (Don’t forget to turn on Ray or Z Transparency) and add whatever funky shield texture you want
Now - make a blend texture. Make it Sphere and make a colourband going from black, fully transparent to white, fully opaque (So the white appears in the center in the preview window.)
Back to materials - Set the “Map Input” for the sphere texture to Object and write “ShieldHit” in the box next to it.
Set the X,Y and Z scaling to about 0.5 (This is about how much of the shield you want to illuminate with the reaction to the blast)
Now map the sphere texture to alpha and render.
The shield should only be showing where the empty “ShieldHit” touches it.
For ease, parent Shield to the ship and ShieldHit to the shield, then put them both on a different layer until you need them!
Here : BLEND FILE
thanks a lot! That works good, yust like i wanted it to be… 
I now tried the whole thing as a motion with the empty. That works fine. But is there a way to make the texture itself move, too? Maybe with changing alpha values? With IPO this normally works, but how do i parent this texture motion to the empty? Or what should i do too let the texture move?
The testure component that makes the shield visible is already following the empty. If you move the empty to, say, the center of the shield, or well away and the “Hit” effect should go away.
If you want the texture that defines the look of the shield at the point it’s hit to move and squirm, try adding a motion IPO to the Z offset of that texture.
Cog has some great tutorials on using empties and IPOs to manipulate textures on his website: http://www.cogfilms.com/
Hope that answers the question.