I have been messing with blender for a while now and I’ve begun experimenting with blender to create visual effects. I have gotten some working footage now but I was wondering if anyone knew of a good way to create a muzzle flash. I have made some that work, I suppose, but they look to smooth and orderly. Other than that I wanted to know if anyone knew of any tutorials and or tips that have been posted on visual effects with blender.
Thanks!
-Sir Baggiepants
edit: also, I’ve put an mpg on top of a plane and fit it to the camera. (After make the camera the size of the original video.) this works but I can’t edit the video in real time. I can’t go frame by frame and see the change in frame in the actual video. It just stays on the starting frame of the vid. (Which I have changed.) Is there anyway to make the image change fram every time I change frame in blender?
a flash is a png sequence about 3 frames long, you can paint it yourself if you wish. Parent the flame to the gun if it is CG, or motion-track the muzzle tip. Start the sequence whenever you want the gun to fire (hopefully the actor shook the gun a little). YouTube has about 808 hits.
To playback in Blender, you are animating a texture. So load the texture and click Sequence. As far as good workflow for easily making multiple gunshots, someone else can chime in, but right now I would just copy those image files and change the frame number in the sequence. Blender will pick them up as it reaches that frame number. So your Gun-01 folder might have flash0030.png, flash0031.png, flash0032.png, flash0060.png, flash0061.png, flash0062.png
A simple batch command file or py script to copy them based on a list should be easy to figure out, in case you change your timings or the images themselves.
Yup- What he said.
Also on the sequence settings there is an “offset” setting to offset the frames by a certain amount- that will give you some timing too. Try glow node compositing…