Warp drive matter collector animation

[Eric2575]

What's the best way to animate those bulbs? I'd like to get an effect of a gaseous substance swirling in the bulb. John3D I need you!

[Eric2575]

Animated decal? Animated material? It also needs to be render friendly.

[MattWBradbury]

Create an animated decal of a moving material. Set that as your ambiance map for the bulb, and then turn on glow for the bulb surface. The Glow should appear where the surface is brightest, so it will give it a bit of dimension. You can adjust the glow settings in the Choreography so you get the best results.

 

Look at many different materials. Just make sure to make your material repeating or you'll have visible transitions.

[johnl3d]

I played around with a material animating it pulsing and just flowing for 30 frames. each ball facing opposite direction

 

blue.mov pulse

 

blue1.mov flow

 

blue.zip v14

 

 

do you have a link to what you are trying to get ?

[Mr. Jaqe]

Neat trick, Matt, gonna come in handy (I love spaceships ^^).

 

Cool stuff, John, as always.

[Eric2575]

I don't have a link to what I am trying to achieve, but you are getting really close. I just remember the old Star trek episodes and the way they showed the Enterprise hovering in space. If the orbs in your demo weren't so defined, more like clouds, it would be perfect. The pic below isn't the best representation of what I'm trying to do, but the combination of your demo and that pic would about do it.

[BrainLock]

Someone made a model of the original Enterprise a while ago that solved the problem. I'm trying to find a link to it. Google seems to have lost it. I have the model somewhere, but can't find it right now. The model was very detailed and even included details inside the bridge.

[johnl3d]

did a slight change in material

 

 

red.mov

 

red.zip

[GizmoMkI]

Three years ago, I did a modification to Nick Porcino's Enterprise model for a parody film I was making in A:M 8.5 . I had originally tried to use a repeating image file but tests were unsuccessful, most likely due to my not understanding how to make them work. My brute force solution involved creating an action file which physically rotated decaled half spheres just behind the forward engine domes. It was pretty sloppy since I was improvising and only half understanding what I was doing, but it worked well enough to make a few acceptable beauty shots. Here's the longest take on the engines. Apparently I didn't have it lined up properly because the spinning looks a bit odd, and is most noticeable from this angle. In this shot, the Enterprise was stationary, the camera is moving toward it, and 2 instances of Carmine Rizzolo's Star Spheres models are adding to the illusion of forward motion.

 

engtest2.mov

[Eric2575]

Gizmo:

 

The method you described was exactly what I had been using up to this point. The results aren't bad at all, just a little too static for what I would like to accomplish.

 

John:

 

I love taking your stuff apart and learning from it. That last one is the best yet. Thank you for the files.

 

Using everyone's input, I think I have come up with then end product for the effect. I hope to have the movie clip posted soon, but I still have a starfield effect and some more modeling/texturing to do.

 

Thanks again

 

Eric

[Darkwing]

Here's a little reference,

 

Enterprise nx 01

 

It appears there's some yellow in the bussard collectors as well.

[johnl3d]

Threw this together

 

endlight.mov

 

animated the material with an expression in an on/off pose

 

 

endlight.zip

 

 

 

[johnl3d]

Threw this together

 

endlight.mov

 

animated the material with an expression in an on/off pose

 

 

endlight.zip

 

 

 

[GizmoMkI]

One thing I read about the original Kirk's version Enterprise, for the nacelle effect the physical miniature used a rotating disk that had something like randomly blinking Christmas lights on it. That might work for an idea on simulating the effect.

 

I must have seen it on Nick Porcino's site, here's the link: http://www.geocities.com/n_porcino/

Select Gallery from the menu, then USS Enterprise, then scroll down to the Nacelles section.

[largento]

Actually, it wasn't the lights that rotatated:

 

 

This quote from a story about a guy who was able to borrow the 11-foot model to display at his college in 1972:

 

The nacelle domes were white translucent hemispheres. Removing the exterior nacelle domes, there was a clear interior hemisphere with black lines that bisected the hemisphere, and this rotated at various controlled speeds. The starboard nacelle interior dome rotated clockwise, while the port side rotated counter-clockwise. Ten multicolored miniature Christmas lights were in each nacelle dome, just behind the rotating interior hemisphere.

 

(Obviously when he's saying miniature Christmas lights, he's talking about the old-style Christmas lights which were considerably larger than the kind used today.)

[largento]

Made this quick little graphic to demonstrate the description:

 

[Darkwing]

The question is, what class of vessel are you animating. Each class has something different for the bussards. Everyone is focusing on the constitution, but if this is for your challenger model, than it looks like the bussards are somewhat different. They appear more gaseous, with a little hint of tsomething spinning, but not quite as pronounced as the constitution class.

[Eric2575]

You're right Darkwing, it is for the Challenger NX class ship and the nacelle domes are more gaseous.

 

It really shocked me to find that adding several navigation lights with three actions and adding the animated decal for the nacelles increased render times about 4 times. This is way off the charts. A short clip that took about 9 hours to render now takes days at 1024 678 resolution.

 

I wanted to render for HD output but at those render lengths it seems ludicrous to do it just for fun. My God, what do they use to make digital movies like "Transformers", Cray (I know, that's old school) supercomputers? Anyone know what digital studios use nowadays? I can't wait for home computers to be powerful enough to render a short movie like this in a couple of minutes.

 

I'll probably just do a vga clip with a still at wallpaper size to boot.

[GizmoMkI]

On the side topic of high definition, here's a site that does a discussion of wide screen theatrical formats and their conversion for television broadcast. At the bottom of page 2, there's some interesting information on how they reformatted "A Bug's Life" for TV ("full screen").

 

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/ana...creenorama.html

[Darkwing]

As far as I know, they just set their shots up and when the go to bed they hit render and let it render for the amountof time it takes. At least that's what they said on my Andromeda DVDs.