Difficult Effect! Cloaking Starships...

[DeathCarrot]

umm... im not 100% sure of what kind of cloaking you mean... but.. morph the textures from the current to a completely see-through texture

[DXtreme]

thx for the hint....
i mean cloaking like star trek...romulan and klingons!

[Per-Anders]

i would do use particles and Bhodinut proximal (targetting the particles) in the transparency/alpha layer of the ships material. then just get the ship to either fly through enough particles so that it's invisible till it comes out ofthe particles or going into teh stream... or you could use a movie clip made in after effects of noise growing accross a gradient so that teh ship appears a bit at a time .

as for cloaked look that's easy. the material for cloaked is just transparency (nothing else) with a low index of refraction... maybe 1.2. no additive, no color channel, no specular, and that will do the trick.

[DXtreme]

hey mdme_sadie...
thx for this idea...will try this...but at last one question..is there a tutorial or something like this concerning this topic...cause to see an example file is much better to understand!

for today thx a lot guys...even only two of you answered!
i know star trek is not the best topic ..most of you like creatures an such things,so i'm very thankfull for this little help!

[leigh]

A couple of years ago, I did a short animation in Max that had a load of small fighters cloaking.
I found that what looked really cool, apart from animating the surfaces, was to actually animate a distortion of the model itself.
The way I did that in Max was by simply adding an animated noise to the model, and animating it so that it kinda wobbled as it faded out of the scene.

As for animating the actual fading out of the ship, I wouldn't recommend fading it's surface to transparent, because even if a surface is transparent, it still has substance.

I don't know anything about C4D, but surely there must be a setting to actually dissolve an object straight out of the scene? This is the kind of setting you should use, or else you are going to end up with a glasslike object, instead of one that simply isn't there. Unless that is the effect you are after :)

[kiwi]

Ya there is a distortion wobble actually when they cloak and de cloak,come to think of it.Almost like an s shaped noise/alpha or something emanates out in a radial gradient type manner...........dont know enough about particle systems to be much help :hmm:



Stu.

[Per-Anders]

actually there's no clipping in c4d :/ (wish there was). however you can use an alpha mask to blend a transparent texture into your current texture. the c4d transparency by default isn't additive and is sans fresnel (unless you tick the box) so going ot transparent should do the trick for the most part (it'll ignore the diffuse/color) for completeness though you should also have the same proximal effect going on in the specular color channel. then you should be left with nothing but a distorting background... if there are any other channels still appearing there then just add in a fusion and the proximal in the alpha of the fusion for those channels (drop in your current texture into teh top channel of the fusion). should do the trick... oh for the joys of a node based texture system... then this'll be so much faster/easier. (it'll happen).

[Caravaggio]

But if you use just a transparency texture channel then won't there be some parts of the back side of the model that you'll be able to see from the front where your camera is? If I were you I'd use the Visibility track in the timeline options. Maybe you could make two textures, one normal and one for the phase out. Keyframe the material so that the regular textures blend into the phase out texture (a glow or something) and then have it start to fade out in the visibility track about half way through that.

[Per-Anders]

hmm... you're right that would be bad... but what would be better than all of that would be to simply do three passes as follows

one of the ship in all it's glory
one of the ship as trarnsparent
one of the ship in black&white with proximal affecting it, as a mask... do this by having the proximal in the luminosty channel, and nothing else in this pass

then use after effects or even photoshop to composite these using the black and white mask layer to mask out either the solid ship of the cloacked ship on top of the other... then you will get the effect of the ship cloaking or uncloacking... thinking about it, taht's prolly the most logical way to do things... no dicking around with complex texture trees :)

[creart]

If it just a still or a very simple animation, with hardly any ship's movement, why not render the ship with alpha first and use that as texture on a plane and use transparancy on that?

[anobrin]

Just add a visibility track and a pulsate track for the" vibrating out of sight" effect

I did this crude test in 4 minutes
http://66.70.166.29/promo/CLOAK.mov

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