SHip Cloaking

stscifiguy

Trying to find a tutorial for ship cloaking that will work in lightwave 9:)

fluxfire

There are several ways you can do this one way that i found works is to use a dissolve envelope on the ship its self so that it can dissappear and reappear over a set number of frames.

Here is a link to show you how to dissolve them using Hypervoxels but it works the same way on an object. Go to the tips and tricks section look for how to dissolve hypervoxels.

Sarraj

I do it the lazy by increasing the transparancy (never can remember what that o word is) and adding motion blur, increasing a lil bit the more the ship dissapears. Never though about other ways. That dissolve thingie sound like it'll make the mesh dissolve with the pixle squares like in photoshop. Should try that sometime

Eoraptor

I've had moderate success by putting a spherical object, or even a poly object, around the ship, and then forcing the whole thing (read mesh and sphere) to become progressivly transparent, while at the same time increasing the "bump" map and/or "Distortion" map on the sphere (you'll need a black and white map that is seemless and nothing but alternating black and white wavy lines), just make sure that the object you're trying to cloak beneath it is set to "cast/receive no shadows" etc

[Deleted User]

Hmm I dit it the following way... create your scene, render the background and the ship seperately. The ship render should be put out as *.tif images with transparency (alpha channel) turned on. Then create a new scene, go to top view, create to planes matching the window / image aspect ratio. The two planes should have a slight distance to each other. Now apply textures: the ship render on top, the background render below. Add a noise effect on the top plane, and that's all.

Example:
http://mitglied.lycos.de/nimrod_1/Movies/vorcha_cloak.avi (right click - save as)
Vorcha mesh by Ebolii.

fluxfire

@Nimrod
Duder can't see the video.......can you redo it in a wmv or .mov format?

[Deleted User]

Okay, here it is in WMV format... poor quality now
But what the heck, you still see the effect.

http://mitglied.lycos.de/nimrod_1/Movies/vorcha_cloak.WMV

fluxfire

@Nimrod
Nice duder little short but still good. What happens if you give it a specularity texture? does it do like in the original ST movies of a bird of prey cloaking?

[Deleted User]

I know what you mean, I always liked this effect... But I think it looks more like a displacement the RGB channels... I see if I can do something similar.