Hey, I was trying to create a nice pulse weapon effect, i would prefer an animated material for the pulse but if unanimated could look good im open to all ideas.
If Anyone could help it would be really appreciated
Thanks for your time guys,
Armorhead
Didn´t Skye Dodds once write a short tutorial on the trick used for energy projectiles in most games? Basically you just map a teardrop-shaped blurred outline onto a plane in the diffuse (to control a color gradient) and alpha channels, rotate a copy of it by 90° along the main axis, slap an omni light in the center and tweak the whole thing with glow and star streaks in post-processing. The complicated part seemed to be finding out which settings gave satisfying results for a specific situation.
OK.. here is my quick tutorial that I did in about 20 minutes. I'll show you how, but I'm not going to provide the files, because I feel that 80% of learning is doing.. and you'll only learn by DOING this.
Pulse Phasers with just planes and maps. (should work with most 3D applications)
1. In you painting progam you will need to create two maps. For this example I made one 200x800 and another 200x200. The longer map is for the tail of the pulse and the smaller one is for the ball or photon is self.
To make the LONGER map I simple make a gradient ball and using PHOTOSHOPS smudge tool I clicked and shift-dragged (straight line) to create the long tail.
The smaller map was the same gradient, just in a ball.
SAVE BOTH AS PNG files with TRANSPARENCY.
2. In make make a new material for the LONG TAIL.
Use the settings below by placing the maps in the proper slots for opacity, diffuse and self-illumination. Make SURE the map is 2-sided!!! Call this map Tail.
3. Make another map but with just the 200x200 map just like before but call it photon.
4. In make create a plane that is 800x200 (you can scale it later). Apply the TAIL map to this object. Render, you should get a tail. But it only looks good from certain perspectives.. which is why we need more planes.
5. With the TAIL object selected and the snap to angle turned ON.. rotate the TAIL OBJECT 30 degrees and repest this 5 times.
6. Now make a 200x200 plane and apply the photon map. DO the same rotation/replicate of the object like you did before. The added DIFFERENCE to this grouping is you will ALSO rotate the orginal plane object again along the perpendicular axis to create a box like grouping. This will give your PHOTON volume when viewed from the TOP, FRONT, and SIDE.
I moved the group that now looks like a box, and that serves as your pulse body down into tail group so it's aligned with the thicker part of the map and then grouped the entire thing..
That is your photon object, simple copy the group, animate it along a path or whatever.. good luck!
Well, I break my silence (I am one of those that doesn't post much) just to thank Aceman's for the tutorial! :thumb: I was trying to do this effect without much success (still not too experienced with MAX) but this certainly cleared up a lot of things. Thanks!
It's hard for me to tell, possibly depending on how you lit the scene, but I think you'll need to put any shininess to zero for your materials. That white part might just be the light reflecting.
If you show a screenshot of your materials settings, we could probably tell for sure what's happening.
How I do it is deform a sphere into a teardrop shape and texture it white, then add some videopost glow effects. You can pulsate the glow by altering its size or even deform the base model. Not as fiddly imo.
And i recommend to check what happen if you active or desactive "Premultiply Alpha" These setting can doing weird effects how of apply the alpha channel.
Aceman, :thumb: cool tut !!!! I was doing Defiant Pulse phasers, making a deformed tetrahedron and adding glow, but your method is much more cool !
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Another example would be the banshee or ghost from halo 2.
Sorry again, and thanks for your time,
Armorhead
Keep in mind he was askin how to do this in MAX, I am not sure if you can adapt it to truespace or not?
you got a point there, although some things shouldn't be too hard to translate, although i may have to be creative
the basic ideas should be the same though, e.g, put a plane here, a light there etc.
Still would be nice to find a particle weapon tut
Like a particle beam weapon?
Using this tutorial/thread I made this scene.
That is a .max file. Not exactly a tut on how to do that.....but usefull none the less
True, but the basics, as he ran them down, should be the same.
Particles, gravity, textures and some glow effects. I would even think that it might apply to pulse weaponry.
But the gist of the tutoral used two planes perpendicular to one another with a texture applied to create the burst effect.
I'll post an example shortly if I can.
Aceman
This folder contains all of the old SPECIAL EFFECTS tutorials related to phasers and photons.
I'll post a very brief and EFFECTIVE tutorial on pulse phasers in just a few moments.
Aceman
Pulse Phasers with just planes and maps. (should work with most 3D applications)
1. In you painting progam you will need to create two maps. For this example I made one 200x800 and another 200x200. The longer map is for the tail of the pulse and the smaller one is for the ball or photon is self.
To make the LONGER map I simple make a gradient ball and using PHOTOSHOPS smudge tool I clicked and shift-dragged (straight line) to create the long tail.
The smaller map was the same gradient, just in a ball.
SAVE BOTH AS PNG files with TRANSPARENCY.
2. In make make a new material for the LONG TAIL.
Use the settings below by placing the maps in the proper slots for opacity, diffuse and self-illumination. Make SURE the map is 2-sided!!! Call this map Tail.
3. Make another map but with just the 200x200 map just like before but call it photon.
4. In make create a plane that is 800x200 (you can scale it later). Apply the TAIL map to this object. Render, you should get a tail. But it only looks good from certain perspectives.. which is why we need more planes.
5. With the TAIL object selected and the snap to angle turned ON.. rotate the TAIL OBJECT 30 degrees and repest this 5 times.
6. Now make a 200x200 plane and apply the photon map. DO the same rotation/replicate of the object like you did before. The added DIFFERENCE to this grouping is you will ALSO rotate the orginal plane object again along the perpendicular axis to create a box like grouping. This will give your PHOTON volume when viewed from the TOP, FRONT, and SIDE.
I moved the group that now looks like a box, and that serves as your pulse body down into tail group so it's aligned with the thicker part of the map and then grouped the entire thing..
That is your photon object, simple copy the group, animate it along a path or whatever.. good luck!
Aceman
At least now i have an idea of what to do in LW to make them.
Thanks Aceman
Here is a image of photoshop
What i did in photoshop i tried it in 3d max and this is how it turned out
So can someone help i dont know what im doing wrong.
It's hard for me to tell, possibly depending on how you lit the scene, but I think you'll need to put any shininess to zero for your materials. That white part might just be the light reflecting.
If you show a screenshot of your materials settings, we could probably tell for sure what's happening.
And i recommend to check what happen if you active or desactive "Premultiply Alpha" These setting can doing weird effects how of apply the alpha channel.
Aceman, :thumb: cool tut !!!! I was doing Defiant Pulse phasers, making a deformed tetrahedron and adding glow, but your method is much more cool !