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Julian

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Posts posted by Julian

  1. You could create a copy of the character's model with no decals and add a transparent glowing material to it, put it in the same pose as the character when he starts his move, then animate the transparency.

  2. if you ever played mech assault2 there is one mech with plasma ppcs thats sorta the look im going for

    You could fire out a small 8-patch sphere set to 100% transparency, which would be a sprite emitter. The emitter would produce two kinds of sprites: a small dot, which would be the trail of sparks behind the projectile, and the electrical arcs that look like lightning (making the sprite an animated image sequence would be a plus), which would have a very short life expectancy so it wouldn't leave a trail. The sprite system should not be influenced by gravity. Constrain a light with a lens flare to the projectile to produce the blue glow.

  3. You could try something like a material with Perlin turbulence, but it would help if you told us what kind of object you're creating: a projectile, a containment field, a Star Trek-style warp core?

  4. A number of classic science fiction short stories are suited to this medium. To name a few:

     

    "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum

    "Surface Tension" by James Blish

    "Microcosmic God" by Theodore Sturgeon

    "Tenderfoot in Space" by Robert A. Heinlein

     

    Or for another full length feature, Hal Clement's novel Mission of Gravity.

     

    I'd vote for any of those.

    One of the requirements that Martin set when he first came up with the idea of a Hash movie project was that he couldn't afford to buy the film rights for a copyrighted novel, so he only wanted to adapt works in the public domain. That's why he ended up settling for Oz.

     

    At the time, I suggested Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but it'd require a lot of ocean wave effects.

  5. It looks like there's an inner glow that's really bright and seems to be showing up over the planet model, even though the Glow model is larger than the planet. :unsure:

    If the glow shows up over the planet model, the Halo Starts % value is too small. The important thing is to keep track of exactly how much bigger the glow object is compared to the planet object, then set Halo Starts % to the reciprocal of the scaling factor. For example, if you created the glow by scaling up the planet mesh by 120%, then if you set Halo Starts to 83.33%, the glow will touch the surface exactly.

     

    BTW, I misremembered in my earlier post -- the maximum value for transparency on a group with PlanetGlow is 99.5%, not 95%. You can set transparency to 99.49% and it'll be OK.

     

    Well, here's a few pictures to show the results. Again, that inner glow sphere seems to be the problem. These renders were in V14 using MultiPass 1 Pass. I see in Yves' sample project he uses a Spherical Combiner Material with Planet Glow set on two of the Attributes. Do you also use a Combiner with multiple Attributes that use the Shader? I assume this gives a better look?

    I don't think you should use that page on Yves' site as a guide to using the modern PlanetGlow shader, because he created the page back in version 8.5, and PlanetGlow works differently after Yves rewrote it to work in version 12. Putting PlanetGlow inside a material isn't necessary. Also, if you use PlanetGlow on an object with Receive Shadows turned off, the glow will show up even on the nightside of the planet, which isn't strictly realistic and may not be the kind of effect you want. However, if you have Receive Shadows turned on, the planet will cast a hard-edged shadow on the PlanetGlow object. I've discovered a way of softening the transition on PlanetGlow from the dayside to the nightside, but it's pretty complicated to explain: it involves a gradient material with a huge increase in diffuse falloff, whose rotation is linked with an expression to a bone constrained to orient like the sun. This is kind of thing I'd want to write a tutorial for.

  6. I've added some new renders to my A:M Stills gallery of astronomical art that I first announced in this thread nearly a year ago. Having found some improved textures, I've finally been able to finish modeling the Earth's moon and the seven major moons of Saturn. The Saturn moon maps come from Steve Albers' planetary map site.

     

    post-334-1187753797_thumb.jpg

    Titan was rendered with PlanetGlow, but it doesn't look exactly right. You shouldn't be able to see the horizon at all, but I can't think of any other solution that would work, except for vibrating the model really fast in multipass, but I'd rather not do that.

     

    post-334-1187753870_thumb.jpg

    I used a displacement map (16 bpc EXR file) to create the equatorial ridge on Iapetus. I expect I'll need to update the the Iapetus texture next month when the Cassini probe goes in for its closest approach and fills in most of the "terra incognita" areas.

  7. First of all, when using any shaders, you have to turn on Plugin Shaders in your render options. Second, the larger sphere has to be less than 95% transparent, otherwise the shader disappears. For the last year, I've been meaning to write a tutorial about using PlanetGlow, but I haven't gotten around to it.

  8. I see the lines shooting out problem only when I PageUp to set the number of realtime polys per patch to 16 (the second-highest setting), or if I enter Bones mode. The lines are shooting out of the CPs under his fingernails, which seem to be modeled in a peculiar way. Deleting those CPs may solve the problem.

  9. ok thanks for that I'll try it later, I just couldn't see any normals coming off some patches at all! Could be my eyesight.

    In shaded mode, if the normal is turned inward it looks like a tiny yellow dot.

  10. Where do I find the porcelain material? I've looked. (I'm using V13 at the moment)

    On the A:M CD, it's in Data\Materials\Geometry\Porcelain.mat. When you open it, it looks just like a regular material with one attribute, except that at the very bottom of the Surface properties there's an extra value called "Normal Weight". Usually, you want to set it to 100%, unless you find that this amount of smoothing is obscuring some detail you want to keep.

  11. Well I give up. What's the trick? I have a Intel Mac and no matter how I drag and click and tilde or whatever I can't get a hook.

    When you extend a spline with the intention of making a hook, press Shift-A instead of A. (A lot of longtime A:M users will forget to tell you do that, because this behavior was introduced with the stitch feature back in version 10.)

  12. Do you have porcelain turned on? I can see from your screenshot that the patches with dark corners have their normals flipped inward. Select a patch with inward-pointing normals using the patch selection tool (Shift-P) and flip the normal by pressing F. At least, that's what I have the shortcuts set to, but I don't remember if they're the defaults.

  13. I just didn't know if that was common when putting a light inside an object.

    This is normal when you add a light inside a model. The light in the model overrides the light that usually comes from the camera, so the light in the model is now the only light source. To see how the model looks when lit, you could add another light outside the model and delete it when you're done modeling, or you could put the model into a choreography and look at it there.

  14. I was going to suggest Hyppogyraffe at first too because it is closer to the book, but after reading Nancy's response, I have to agree with her.

    The Hippogyraf turning into Ozma doesn't make it closer to the book. In the book, Ozma and Dorothy use the Magic Picture in the Emerald City to keep the Tin Woodman's party under surveillance, and go off to bail them out of trouble in a red wagon pulled by the Wooden Sawhorse.

  15. Even though it wasn't a TWO-related bug, I changed how the MIPMapping worked for someone whose image changed blur levels abruptly across the surface. Sometimes people like MIPMapping (blurry is popular), and sometimes people like "ScanBitmap" (exact pixel coverage), but mixing the two on the same surface is a no-no.

    Is there a way of controlling which method gets used?

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