Can someone explain how this works?

efritsch

I downloaded a rather neat shield file/tutorial. I got it from here, which vaguely explains things but I really don't grasp it entirely. I get most of it, except where the shield 'bubble' comes from.

I'd appreciate it if someone could flesh it out as to how it works, that'd be great.


[edit]MAX file cut.

And the very brief expalination of how it works.
..::xenomorphic.co.uk::..

Thanks in advance everyone.

count23

you make the shield bubble as a sphere you stretch around the object, give it 100% transperency and a a collision event so that it can interact with your particles.

Our shield, for this example, would be a large sphere that has been scaled down a little in the Z-Axis, and should create an impact mark which would fade over time (controlled by a Particle Age map) and a fresnel perpendicular bubble effect around the region of the impact site (created by a Falloff map and nested gradients).

Melak

The sphere is just shown as a box, check the display options for that...
I tried to recreate this effect, I got everything set up the same way but the differences are: the newly created geometry from the impact doesn't get UV mapped properly so I can't really display any texture on it the way I want, and it doesn't "refresh" properly...If I move the emitter, the touching particle will hit at a different point, but the created impact geometry doesn't move (only if I move the emitter quite a bit)...If I use the PFlow from the zip file, it works perfectly but I can't find any difference between the two PFlow setups!

Guerrilla

Hi efritsch. I removed the MAX file from your post, mainly because I've heard Pete has had some trouble with people pilfering his stuff in the past, so I'm just making sure we're not stepping on anyone's toes. The file's available from his site anyway.

As far as the shield system goes, it's mainly a particle system. PFlow fires off a pretty standard particle, which hits a deflector (sphere deflector) and creates another particle, which gets its shape (some kind of shape operator, the name escapes me) based on the part of the sphere the particle hits. Basically the new particle is a boolean intersection of the sphere mesh. Add a nice animated texture and you're set.

Hope some of that made sense.

Melak

It's called Shape Mark, just look at the particle flow in the Particle View ("6" key)