How do I create a muzzle flash?

[Per-Anders]

set up five spotlights with narrow beams (or you can use omni lights that you squash into long thin shapes). one straight out, then four radially from teh opening of the barrel, set their luminosity to a few thousand percent and make sure they all have some inverse falloff that's not too far (as you don't want the flash to light up hat much outside of thelights area), add ni lots of noise bring the contrast up way high, and animate it moving pretty fast so each "shot" has different noise types, then play around till you have a nice looping effect, maybe add in a smaller omin visible light that's not sqaushed right at the muzle. next animate the lights "enabled" parameter in light with the firing, you can either do that with xpresso quickly, a pulsate tag (i think should allow this, can't remember) or manually. good luck

[trfalk]

It took me a bit of time to play with, but I think I got the muzzle flash effect you might like. www.isauras.com/toddfalk/shot2.avi (divx 5.02 needed) Rendered in ver 8.1

The cloud is a pyrocluster (default fireball) emitting from a point at the barrel...shot of 1 lasting about 6 frames.

The light flash is also a TP particle set to flash for one frame only syncronized with with pyrocluster.

2 TP groups used and a very length and inefficient Xpression. I could streamline it.

Pardon the weak animation on the character - I was testing PoseMixer at the time. I conclude that it has too much of a "morphing look" and squashes and scales oddly for a complete figure.

[trfalk]

For the high rate of fire of a gatling gun...I would say use a single pyrocluster particle, but do not have it age. Instead change it's seed value or any other way of making the ball change its appearance. Increase the illumination of it and less cloudy. Add a little vibration to it, and you have something that looks like it shots x shots per second, x= current frame rate. Effect would be a PC particle morphing at the end of the barrel, randomized lighting/dimenisons.

Low system resources - If your camera doesn't move... you could always flat project a fire animation onto a plane; which extends from the barrel. Cycle through maybe 3-4 images, 1 per frame. You aren't going to get volumetric effects, but you will have something.

In addition, check out www.peranders.com TP sprite tutorial.

[RP-350Z]

mdme_sadie,

Attached is what I have so far. Any comments would be appreciated. Let me list a few points I'm unclear of:

- When you say set their luminosity to a few thousand percent do you do this under <Noise --> Illumination Scale?>

- When adding lots of noise I have used several types, but don't see a change in the way my flash looks, I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

- When you say animate it moving pretty fast, would I do this by editing the Wind and Wind Velocity settings?

- I'm unsure of what you mean by animate the lights "enabled" parameter. Can you elaborate on that?

Trfalk,
Thanks for the help also. I plan on trying out both methods of creating the flash, I just have yet to play with pyroclusters and particles.

Thanks again! Yall are a big help!

-Ryan
http://rpenn.gerred.org/flash.jpg

[JIII]

hmm thats a nice looking flash but if you really want to see the noise and how it helps you might want to lower the brightness a bit. I have found that brightness screws up the noise sometimes.

but I wouldnt bother with noise cause your flash looks good already.

[RP-350Z]

Thanks JIII,

I kinda like the flash too. How would I go about animating it so that it doesn't look static? Any ideas?

-Ryan

[JIII]

well if I am right a gatling gun does not fire from every barrel at once. just from the top one right?

one problem you might have is that if you really want to make it look real its gonna be hard unless you use like 1500 frames a minute bcause the high rate of fire with make the camera not able to pick up every shot. so you should use that viberate expression's scale frequency up real high. and then try and match the rotating barrels with the plusating flash.

in fact if you cant match them up you are screwed. but you might be able to do this with Xpresso. like every time a barrel passes a point trigger a flash.

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