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How to: create energy shield (Stargate style)

Davide_sdDavide_sd4 Posts: 0Member
edited August 2009 in Tutorials #1
This is my first tutorial and i'm going to show you an easy and fast way to create energy shield for 3d pictures. This type of shield is similar to the ones used on the Stargate Atlantis's ships.

Let's start: Open 3DS Max (i'm using Max 2009, but i hope this work also with previus versions) and import one of your ship, setup the scene and lighting as you want.
Now create a cylinder or a sphere around the ship; i usually use a cylinder, most of the times i use a combination of more cylinders. The shield are obviously bigger than the ship, so scale them as you like.
With the cylinder selected, right click on it, select Object Properties and disable the Receive and cast shadows option. Click ok.
Go to the modifiers list and apply to the cylinder an UVW Map modifier and set the mapping type to Cylinder. In this way we could easily rotate the mapping coordinates and move the effects over the shields.

Open the Material Editor (press M) select an empty material and named it "Shields_material". Set the Self Illumination value to 50, and go to the maps rollout.
Click on the None button in the diffuse slot and add a Mix Map. Now you have a mix map with two color, black and white. Click on the None button beside the black color and add a Noise map. Set the Noise Type to Turbolence, set the size to 5, click on Color Two and set the color to yellow.
Go back to the Mix map and now copy the Noise map beside the black color and Past (Copy) it in the None button beside the white color. Enter in this noise map, change the Noise type to fractal and change the color two to Orange. Now go back to the Mix map. We should now create our mask map.
This is the difficult and tricky part of this tutorial. Open Photoshop, create a new document. I set up the dimensions of this document based on the dimensions of the Cylinder, for example, if i created a cylinder with Radius 20 and Height 50, i used for the new document of Photoshop a Width of (20 x 3.14 x cost) and an height of (50 x cost); the cost is a multiplier value, for example 2,3,...10...
Now select the gradient tool, with a gradient from black to white, change it to Radial Gradient, click on the center of the document and drag a line. In this way you will create a circle with black color in the center of the circle. Press Ctrl+I to invert the color. Save this picture as jpg format.

Go back to Max in the material editor in the Mix Material. Press the None button beside the Mix Amount, click Bitmap and select the picture you have just done with Photoshop. This is all for the Diffuse material.
Go back to the maps rollout and click on the None button beside the Opacity slot, add a Composite Map; you will see 2 None button: the one on the left is the Texture button, while the one on the right is the Mask button. Click on the mask button, choose bitmap and add the picture you've done in Photoshop. Go back to the composite map, and click on the Texture button, add a Noise Map, change the Noise Type to Fractal and set the size to 5. Press the render button. Once you have render the scene, you will see if you have to use a different value for the size of the noise maps. Also, you can easily add more hit point on the shield simply adding more gradient circles in the mask file (in Photoshop), and if necessay you could strech this circle to adjust their shapes on the shields.

In the attachments you will see the mask file i created for the pictures on the second attachment.
Of course this is the base work for the shields, you can improve theme adding a yellow-orange lights on every hit in the shield, and then adding a little glow effect. Don't be afraid to experimenting with the parameters (noise size and noise colours) and the mask map. Hope this tutorial will be helpfull.

If you have any questions, critics or comment, don't esitate to write a post here! :)
70584.jpg
70585.jpg
Post edited by Davide_sd on

Posts

  • MelakMelak332 Posts: 0Member
    It's a nice tutorial.
    If you want to make automated shield impacts, I suggest you take a look at this :)
  • Davide_sdDavide_sd4 Posts: 0Member
    yes, that's a great tutorial, and works really nice for animations...and for 'casual' hit on the shield.
  • themyth212themyth212331 Posts: 0Member
    great tutorial helps alot always wanted to make shields
  • Gog3t3kGog3t3k0 Posts: 0Member
    Do i can make this effect in Blender ?? It won't be an animation, i just wanna take a image when something is hitting. PS. Sorry for my bad english :/
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