Help with shields please

tormox

Hi, im a bit of a noob to animation but for my college work im creating i space battle, ive built the models etc but i dont know how to create the shields for my ships, im using 3ds max 9 and i would like a stargate affect. also if possible i would like it to go colored like it does in stargate when the weapons beams ive made hit it. any step by step info would be much appreciated. thank you in advance

Brickhead

This needs to be moved to 3D Questions and Answers. I have no MOD powers in here.

Guerrilla

Moving to 3d Q&A.

Melak

I know exactly what you are looking for: ..::xenomorphic.co.uk::..

tormox

sorry for using wrong area. That sites shield sounds ideal altough I'm to much of a novice to really understand it, any chance on step by step instructions, many thanks

Guerrilla

Here's a couple older shield threads:

http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/3d-questions-answers/37-shields.html
http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/3d-questions-answers/17388-phasers-shields.html

Comco

tormox - That tutorial really shows great technique - I've yet to see a better one for animations, personally. Feel free to ask questions here on the tut if you like. If you're having trouble understanding what some of it means, you might find some members that are willing to help out...

tormox

A few years ago, we would have quite painstaking operation, manually positioning and keyframing off gradients when particles or geometry intersect with the shield geometry we have set up in the scene. However, with Particle Flow we can key all of this off automatically and, if you want to take it further, even have the shields fail after a period of time or number of impacts so the ship itself is shot to hell… it is simply just a matter of setting up the desired events.

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). To control the impact region generation, we are going to use a Shape Mark operator which, when set to Box Intersection, cuts a chunk out of the reference geometry and planar maps the result – perfect for our needs. Using a combination of Falloff (for the perpendicular effect), radial Gradient Ramp (one to control the impact mark and another to control the strength of the falloff so there isn’t any clipping at the edges of the cut-out geometry) and Particle Age maps we can get the resulting particle geometry to fade over a few frames after the initial impact.

The trick here is the Shape Mark’s Box Intersection parameters – we don’t want a shape that is too small so the effect is not overly visible, but also we don’t want it to be too big else, due to the way the booleaned geometry is mapped, we will have a gradient applied to the opposite side of the shield, so it is a case of playing with the settings until we get something inbetween. All we now need to introduce are a few other effects, such as a single dwelling particle to generate a glow effect at the point of impact, plus any other debris, spark effects or, if you’re any good at scripting, lighting to illuminate the hull. We are using Shape Mark to Boolean out enough geometry to create a decent sized impact “plate” for our material gradient. Here I’ve replaced the teapot with your average UFO, and re-linked and scaled the shield template to fit accordingly before rendering out via Video Post with additional glow elements.

Forgive me for being stupid and a noob but i dont understand any of it really and dont know where half the stuff is in 3ds, if anybody is kind enough to go into more detail i would really appreciate it. i downloaded the zip and rendered it and it is perfect for what i need. again sorry for stupidity. thanks

citizen

tormox wrote: »

Forgive me for being stupid and a noob but i dont understand any of it really and dont know where half the stuff is in 3ds, if anybody is kind enough to go into more detail i would really appreciate it. i downloaded the zip and rendered it and it is perfect for what i need. again sorry for stupidity. thanks

You need to be a bit more specific about what you do and don't understand. Starting off, do you know what PFlow is? That's the particle system he's using, and everything from events to Particle age (actually particle age maps are a material map) are rolled up in the PFlow system. PFlow is a massive subject, one few of us are going to have time to explain in detail here. I'd suggest familiarising yourself with PFlow generally, after that the highlighted paragraph should begin to make more sense to you, try 3DTotal, a quick google brought this up.

There's no substitute for self experimentation. Play around with PFlow, and you should start to find these things make more sense.

tormox

wow ok, ill stuck in with that over the next few days. this is for my assignment at college as well. also is there any tut for sg hyperspace jump holes? thanks guys.

*Edit - So far i understand the particle flow system and i managed to recreate the fireworks and 1 or 2 others but they were in a tut that is step 1, step 2 etc. the xenomorphic tut makes some sense to me now, i still cant use it as it doesnt exactly outline a step guide. does anybody has any spear time to do the change to the guide for me and others please? many thanks

tormox

YouTube - shield effect tutorial part 1 - Part 1
YouTube - shield effect tutorial part2 - Part 2

Just to let you know, i found a good tut on youtube regarding the shields and it is very similar to the xenomorphic tut, but more detail. thanks again for your help guys.