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View Full Version : Im sure its been asked before... making a good looking shockwave?

Tom N.
02-20-2003, 01:58 AM
I have a scene in a short movie im making for a 14 week project where a planet explodes, and im looking for any pointers on making a good shockwave. It doesn't have to be incredibly realistic, just nice looking.

I've tried a few x-ray and ghost shaders on a nurbs torus, they didn't look good so I tried making my own but nothing to good came out of that either, and then I tried emitting particles from the torus but that didn't work great either. Eventually I will get it but I was just seeing if anyone had any ideas or pointers or shaders that might be helpful.

Any response is always appreciated,

-Tom N.
Houkah
02-20-2003, 04:09 AM
Tom,
http://www.directordev.com has some nice tutorials. They all include source .dir files also i think. You might want to do some of your effects in lingo rather than just maya. In the links section be sure to check out den ivanov's page for great 3d lingo files.

On the maya side i found that using maya's bake texture feature gave decent results. Maybe you can use MR's bake texture feature. You can get nice stuff out of maya if you don't care about the file size and memory footprint w/ 1024 textures and 0 for all compression. Just make sure the runtime texture memory usage is relatively low or else a lot of people will be viewing it in software render (rather than directx or openGL). (You can find that info in the shockwave preview window under file statistics.)
Medicine Horse
02-20-2003, 02:20 PM
Is it me or is this reply like totally off. :) I think he means a shockwave explosion not a shockwave (macromedia) movie.
Houkah
02-20-2003, 03:00 PM
hahahaha woops. Yeah i totally misunderstood. Um nevermind all that. Guess i didn't read carefully enough.
Tom N.
02-20-2003, 04:49 PM
hah yeah i was a bit confused about Lingo.. i had never heard of it and when i went to the site i wondered how i was supposed to composite it with maya ;)
Medicine Horse
02-20-2003, 04:53 PM
ROFL! This thread made my day. Not that we couldn't help you anyway....

Well I'm still very new to Maya, but you could try emitting from a NURBS circle. Have the speed of the particles set to 0 or slow and animate the size of the circle.


Add a turbulence field and mess around with the attributes for the look you want. You could apply a gradient to the color and or the opacity to get what your looking for.


HTH
JasonA
02-21-2003, 02:20 AM
If you're willing to spend some money, you can use some Artbeats Digital Film footage. These guys have a bunch of filmed effects which yo ucan apply as an texture to a plane or other object and include in your scene.

Artbeats explosions have been used in NUMEROUS film and broadcast productions, and one of the artbeats reelexplosion sets has a couple of shockwaves on it. Check out http://www.artbeats.com/prod/category.php?pg=2&id=6

I heard you can get big discount prices if you order artbeats footage from www.trinity3d.com
Tom N.
02-21-2003, 03:26 AM
Yeah I've been to that site a long time ago, I forgot about that. It would be nice to have such a realistic explosion but it sorta takes the fun out of it since it isn't something I came up with on my own, plus I wouldn't have learned anything. I think I've finally figured out how to make one that I'm happy with, i looked at this ghost shader that i have and made one similar to it but changed a few things so it looked better, then keyframed the transparency and glow effect. It looks fine when played in real time since its such a quick blast. Thanks everyone for your responses tho!

-Tom N.:D
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