I was just wondering if anyone lnew how to make welding sparks that look fairly realistic.
Thinking about welding torches: you get bursts of very bright light and sparks that fly arround bouncing off objects when the torch is welding, but just the light of the welding flame when not welding.
I can’t think of an easy way of doing this but if I where you i’d try:
Create your animation so you know exactly which frames the tourch is welding and which it isn’t
For the flame:
Id set up a little jet of flame using particals (there are loads of tutorials around for partical effects)
For the light:
At the point of the flame I’d set up a lamp with ray tracing (to give nice shaddows)
I’d set the lamp to flicker rappidly from low light when flame is not welding the to very bright when it is - (you can change the level of light for each frame of your animation using key frames (“i”) )
For the sparks:
I’d set up an object (a sphere might be good) and use this to generate a small burst of particals when the tourch is welding
you could set surrounding objects to allow the particals to colide with them (so the sparks would bounce off objects)
The sparks should initially be as bright as possible and fade away at the end, they have a short life (maybe 25 frames)
you might have to create several spark generating objects to generate bursts of sparks at different times in the animation
I might try this myself and see if it works
I tried:
I didn’t try to use particals for the tourch flame - but I should have
not sure about the lighting, I kind of liked the sparks although I should have made them fade out
still only took about an hour so not too bad for a first attempt even though I say so myself
I don’t know if this is exactly what you are looking for, but you can go check it out.
thanks guys for the help but for whowell only, I don’t need the flame, only the sparks (you will only see it for a second or two).