Engine Exhaust Fire

James Eric Mason, jem@cais.com

I worked up some fine engine fire for our project by creating semi-transparent cone-like structures (3 of different shapes and colors) and telling them to rotate on their Z's very rapidly (at 1:1 speed, 173 deg per frame). To create the cones I used Sweep.

The cones were created using boolean polygons. I always work on these from the TOP isometric view because otherwise you easily get aspect errors.

First I drew a fairly precise (~45 segment) circle. Then I set the draw mode to subtract and drew another circle inside it. Then, I haphazardly took out parts of the result with more subtracted circles and free-form polygons, mostly of 7-8 segments. This gave me a broken, rough circle full of gaps (but no distinct internal holes). This done, I moved to perspective view and SWEEP'ed for one sweep (you could use more) and I used both mouse buttons on SCALE POINTS to make it a semi-conical shape. I give this shape a higher than usual luminance and made it mostly (95-98%) transparent. One shape I made blue, one yellow, one red (more and more transparent as you go) and glued 'em together, setting different (large) rotational frames for them. Stuck 'em in back of the engines and ... viola!

As for phaser fire, you could use very long tubes in the same kind of way...

Brian Hickey, redbaron@fn.net

Making spaceship engine exhausts is another application of the Glow effect available using the Paint vertices tool that I explained in the section entitled, "Glows and Visible Lights".

1. Create a cone with a latitude set to 3 and a longitude set to 12
2. Create a material with a flat shade, color of R255 G255 B255 and a 100% Transparency.
3. Flatten the cone to 2D
4. Set the material as above but then select a bright yellow and set the transparency to about 80%
5. Goto a top view
6. Using the Paint Vertices tool paint the center, filling all the triangle facets with a smooth gradient from the center out to the next set of facets.
7. Change the color to an orange an paint the next set of vertices. This should no look like a smooth gradient glow from yellow to orange to clear.
8. Duplicate the flattened cone 3 times and rotate from the center for all axis X, Y, and Z.
9. Glue each of them together as siblings.

Now you have a glowing sphere visible from all directions. You can also stretch one end of the sphere using the volume defromation tool to give it a trailing exhaust look.

The Ubiquitous Lens Flare

A lens flare is that nifty optical effect you get when you point a camera at a light source -- usually seen as one or more colored halos of light that move and change colors as you move the camera. They are (perhaps too) often simulated in 3D animations for sci-fi television (Babylon 5, Deep Space 9, Sea Quest, etc.). The examples from television are typically produced with a special lens effect in the 3D software itself (Lightwave, 3D Studio, Imagine, Real3D all have the effect). Truespace, unfortunately, doesn't have a lens flare effect. However, there are many options for creating them or reasonable facsimiles....

Shane Davison, daviso@cs.uregina.ca

You might want to check out the flare object from Aminet that has been uploaded to ftp.netnet.net: /pub/aminet/gfx/3d/AnimFlare.* It contains a lensflare object in Imagine format (which can be imported into TS) and a brief description of how to use it and/or create your own. Note that because it was created on the Amiga, you may have problems extracting the longer filenames (unless you have an OS that supports them). However, it should be possible to get all the files with a little work.

Various contributors

Filters exist in various image editors and video editors that do reasonable lens flares. The following products contain lens flare-like effects:

• Adobe PhotoShop
• Adobe Premiere
• Media Studio Pro
• In:Sync's Razor, Razor Pro, and Speed Razor

Explosions

Oh boy, what a topic. This one has been discussed alot on the TSML. I should however, distinguish between the two kinds of explosions people typically want to create. One, is a "gasoline" explosion where you get a blast of fiery light. And the other is the disintegrating explosion where an object breaks into a multitude of pieces that fly away from the explosion center. Of course if you want to blow something up, a combination of these two is likely to be what you're looking for. Truespace can simulate both kinds with varying success. Here are the various notes from the TSML. Combinations of the techniques presented here yield the best results.

The definitive information source for TS explosions is an article on that very subject by our own Peter Plantec in issue number 19 of 3D Artist Magazine.

A must-have utility for explosions is Exploder. Originally written by TS user David Strippgen and evidently now supported by Rob Bryerton, Exploder is currently in version 1.36. This program will take an ASCII .cob file containing your victim object and produce another .cob file with an animation of the object shattering into pieces and exploding. Also, you can control many parameters of the explosion to get just the effect you want. Cool, no? Exploder is available on ftp.netnet.net and ftp.caligari.com; the file name is expl-136.zip. Oh, and its shareware and the price is extremely reasonable, so if you use it, then buy it.

Peter Plantec, thenar@cinenet.net

Using Lens Flares for Explosions

One way to make explosions is by compositing the lens flare from Premiere. You start it at a very low level, then take it up over12 frames to full intensity, then down in about six frames. It gives a fabulous explosion effect, like a super nova.

Expanding Fireballs

I tend to like the big fireball kind of optical explosion. trueSpace is capable of some fine blowups using spheres with semi transparent reflection maps on them. Put a local light inside and vary the brightness from say 1.5 to 5.8 very quickly by animating it. (I don't know if it works on version 1). Animate several spheres exploding and then imploding. I have also had a flattened torus expand out from the center to beyond the view. It looks great!

The three secrets are:

• Get your timing down right for the expantion and contraction.
• Get your lights up and down fast (you get distorted fireballs in the center).
• Use a fire or flame reflection map.

I rotate the objects as they expand and contract one inside the other. This gives the effect of swirling fire. I've also just started distorting the spheres as they expand to give a nonsymetrical look. Instead of particles shooting out of this, use the filmy fire and smoke. I think it would be great combined with exploder objects flying out of the center.

Using Exploder to Blow Up a Planet

I took a sphere primative and smooth quad-divided it. Then I triangulated it and quad-divided it three more times. This left me with a very complex sphere. I then ran it through Exploder and set minimum # of chunks to 200 and I made the animation 100 frames with the rotationset at 100 %. I put a very bright red light inside and surfaced the planett with something called black tar, which has a lot of bumps and highlights.

The animation is very interesting. It looks like this planet literally atomizes in a blaze of glory. Part of the secret is to start the light out at 8 or more intensity and deep red color, then over the hundred frames (200 NTSC, BTW) drop the intensity (you could go up and down if you want to set the keys) and end it up with an intensity of 2.0 with a hue of deep green light.

Brian Hickey, redbaron@fn.net

Exploding Wave Front

This is an effect similar to a flat blast wave proceeding the final explosion that you see in movies. Many of you have done this with transparency maps, but here is a way to get a cool effect with TS 2.0's new Procedural Textures. They're not just for Wood, Marble and Stone any more.

1. Create a flattened sphere.
2. In the material box select Phong shading and the wood proc.
3. In the proc. edit box select one of the [smmrwd] to be a bright orange( or whatever color you wish) and a transparency of 15% make the [sprngwd] color black with a transparency of 100%
4. Set the [spr:sum] to .5
5. Set the [ring density] between 2 and 3
6. Set the width and shape vary to 0
7. Set the grain for a Z axis
8. Animate the flattened sphere from a small dense shape to a size that extends well beyond the camera.

This will generate smooth flame like blast waves that explode from the center. It works great with an Exploder object with animated lights in the center.

Visible Light Beams

Bjorn-Kare Nilssen, bjoernk@oslonett.no

Visible light beams are not possible to do automatically in tS. You have to make a cone that has the same size and location as your spotlight cone. Then you give this cone a more or less transparent material, to simulate more or less "dust". You can group this cone with your spotlight, so they move in syncron.

David Campbell, dcampbel@bga.com

I would also add that you can use subtle bump maps on the light cone to simulate the light beam being cast through smokey air. The "wave" bump map works well for this.

Extreme Aspect Ratios

James Eric Mason, jem@cais.com

I created a nifty image after experimenting with extreme aspect ratios in TrueSpace. If you render to a file at something like a 5-to-1 ratio, you get a panovision effect. I did the JPEG interface to my on-line gallery using this fact. The images there were rendered at 600x128.

Also, I did an even further extreme test where I placed a camera at the center of my gallery and created 360 frames for it to sweep around in one-degree intervals, rendering a 64 by 640 -- 64 wide by 640 tall -- stripe each time. I quickly created a Visual Basic program which reads each TGA and extracts only the center 4 pixels, which I calculated to give me an approximate one-degree angle. The result is a mercator projection of the inside of the gallery. You can view the jpeg by clicking here

One neat trick is to take this image -- in tga format -- and place it on a sphere in TS. Place a camera at the center -- and a light too if you are raytracing -- and look around; the curvature of the sphere will normalize the projection, and it will look as if you were actually rendering the whole room! It will be a bit blurry though, and since my original camera was not set to capture a full 180 degrees, there are pinches in the top and the bottom, but it puts a typical TS cubic map to shame. They really ought to use something like this for bitmapped environment shading.

2D Star Fields

David Campbell dcampbel@bga.com

If you want to make star field bitmaps for backgrounds and textures, you must get StarTex, a great utility written by a very accomplished Truespace user named Ian Firth. (Ian did all the graphics for the game "Grey Wolf" using TS.) Anyway, startex is easy to use and allows you adjust parameters like star density, color and location of nebulas. It will then generate an 8 or 24 bit BMP. You can use that directly in Truespace, or you can bring it into your favorite image editor for more tweaking. I've had great success swapping the default black night sky with my own gradient or fractal cloud images. StarTex is available via ftp on ftp.netnet.net, filename: /pub/mirrors/truespace/utils/startx.zip.

You can texture map the star field onto a big sphere and put a camera and spaceship inside it. Wham -- you now have a 360 degree environment for sci-fi animations.

Go one step further. Put another sphere inside the star field sphere. The inner sphere is textured with the marble procedural in TS2 using the parameters for simulating a cloudy sky. (See the section entitled "XXXXX" {link not complete}, for more information on this texture.) Then you'll see the stars peeking out from between the clouds.

Glows and Visible Lights

Brian Hickey, redbaron@fn.net

Here's how to achieve glows using the paint vertices tool. The following example is how I did an engine exhaust glow:

1. Create a cone from the object primitives toolbox.
2. Give it a flat material with 100% transparency and 100% color of your choice (ie. if you use red make sure the color is R255 G0 B0)
3. Choose the paint vertices tool and slide the transparency down to 60-80%
4. Paint the top vertice of the cone for each facet or side.
5. This should give you a cone that is bright at the top and fades to nothing at the bottom like an engine blast.

You can also alter the colors on the sides for interesting effects. For my engine, I turned it on it's side and made it rotate. I then rendered the scene with motion blur, which smoothed out the exhaust even more and gave it some pseudo motion.

You can also make glowing spheres by doing the above and then flattening the cone to a 2D circle. Duplicate the circle 3 times and rotate it for X, Y and Z. This will give you a glowing sphere visible from all directions.

The cone effect also works for visible light shafts.

Shane Davison, daviso@cs.uregina.ca

Brian's technique for engine exhaust glows can also be applied to the creation of visible point lights.

• Create a plane.
• Use a resolution of 2, or
• Quad-divide it once.
• Set up the materials for the object and vertices as described in Brian's tip above.
• Switch to Paint Vertices and click once in the center of the plane.
• Move the plane to the same location as the light source and scale as necessary.
• Rotate the plane to face the camera/eye or, for animations, simply track the plane to the camera... voila!

You can even make any object glow like it has a haze/fog surrounding it by:

• Load the object.
• Use the Top view and rotate the object so it'll look like it does in the final render.
• Use the Spline or Polygon tools to trace the outline of the object.
• Quad-divide the polygon once.
• Set up the materials and click once in the center using Paint Vertices.
• Scale the polygon so it's slightly bigger than the object (about 125%).
• Save it, load it into your final scene, and position and rotate it so that it's in the same location as the object and facing the camera/eye.

... incredible! :) (note: this method doesn't work very well for anims)

Finally, Paint Vertices can actually be used as a substitute for that 3D painting that's been mentioned in magazines (and here) for high-end packages. Simply quad-divide your object many, many times and paint away! Of course, this is fairly impractical but I did manage to paint a cool face on a heavily divided sphere :).

Lightning (TS2 only)

Peter Plantec, thenar@cinenet.net

You can make a fantastic dark clouds and lightning animation for a background using the marble procedural texture. The trick is to paint the procedural texture onto a sky dome (large sphere with camera position inside). Set the vein (lightning) color to white initially and the sharpness to around 8 with complexity also around 8. This should give you a nice streak of light. Make the background color black and when the transparency dialoge comes up, select about 95% transparency. Put in a sky background bit map.

Now apply about 60 frames of animation to the sphere with no motion. (ie. click both times in the same place) Now experiment with changing the sharpness, complexity or xyz values *ever* so slightly. Make your key frames 0 and 60 for these changes.

You might also experiment with small changes in the color of the lightening.

Peter Plantec, thenar@cinenet.net

Here's a slight variation on the lightning animation using the procedural marble texture. Make the stone color reddish, then make it transparent. Next set the vein to yellow-orange and make it 80% opaque. Next fiddle with the sharpness and turb settings. Put sharpness around 7.8 and turb to about 7.5 and experinent until it looks about right for you. Leave the X, Y & Z settings on 2.0 and paint the plane.

Animate the plane with a null path (begining and end in the same place) of about 60 or more frames.

Set the 0 frame as a key frame. Go to the end frame and set it as a key frame. Next, change the marble by changing the transparent stone base color to blue, but keeping the invisibility. (I kid you not, it makes a difference). Next set the turb to nine or ten, move the sharpness up too -- just under 10. Now make very small changes in the xy&/or z scaling (.01 to .03, plus or minus). Keep the grain in the same direction throughout this experiment.

Making sure the last frame is a key frame, paint the plane and render a draft to see where the lightening is. Double check the first frame. The colors and shape should be different to let you know you have two different frames. Render the frames and check it out.

Supernovas

Mark E. Marshall, marshall@ids.net

Here's a neat effect for a startex background. [Ed. Note: startex is a utility for generating bitmap images of star fields. See the section entitled 2D Star Fields on this page for more information.]

1. Make a transparent sphere and flatten the X axis. At around 88% (experiment to taste) transparency apply the background color with the PV tool in the center. (Using yellow for this demo). Increase trans- parency to 98% (again...experiment) and apply a darker color to the same spot (using rosy peach). You should have a smooth two tone (slightly) angular gradient.
2. Repeat above procedure except flatten this sphere on the Z axis. Align the center point with the other sphere (you should be slightly in front with this one). Apply white to the center at 85% transparency. This gradient should be circular with a brighter epicenter.
3. Contract both spheres to pinpoint (using only the non-painted axes so as not to shift the alignment i.e Scale Y,Z for the colored, Scale X, Y for the white).
4. Keyframe a rapid expansion of both spheres to your desired size.
5. Contract only the white sphere till it's star sized again (or slightly larger).
6. Render render render.

Now an addendum to really make it artsy. If you have Photoshop 3.0, duplicate the background and apply the Render->Clouds filter in the location of your Supernova (settings: white on black). If you don't have PS, use a fairly opaque white airbrush in this area, and make some nice swirly patterns. Now, keyframe the background change at the moment the Snova is at it's biggest/brightest. The "clouds" will hold the salmon color in a very surreal manner.

Light Streaming From Text

Ernest Yanarella, Yanarella@msn.com

Here's how to achieve visible light streaming from extruded text. It's quite simple:

• Take your extruded text and copy it.
• Adjust the Z value so that the copy is longer than the text.
• Position the copy in front of the original text.
• Take the glass material from the material library, turn transparency completely up, refraction completely down, select the color you want the visible light to be and paint the copy.
• Paint the front of the copy with complete transparency so that it will show through to the original text.
• Postition the camera near the real extruded text, but so that the end of the copy stretches out of the view .
• Render using raytracing.

An example image using this technique is available on ftp.netnet.net. Click here to see it.

Kon Wilms, kon@metropolis.petech.ac.za

Here's another way to achieve this effect. Using your favorite 2D image editor, make a gradient, black-to-white. Paint with this texture, using planar mapping, over the top of the extruded 'beams' of light, with the white side on the object side:

    text
    |  |  white
    |  |
    |  | black

This way you fake the beams fading out, and you are free to move the beams around the camera view. Self illumination should be on 50%, the extrusion fully transparent. This lets you have a misty effect if you move the cones around a scene where there are other lights, a kind of 'additive' effect.

[Ed. Note: Using the Paint Vertices tool to paint the extruded object, instead of a gradient texture map, seems like it would work fine as well. You would first paint the beams a transparent black, then vertex paint a white onto the vertices on the text side of the beam. This would save you the effort of making the gradient image.]