Solar system how to?

[bigfatMELon]

There are several ways to build up gases and smoke. Both use similar methods only with smoke you use straight opacity or multiply build up while hot gases would use an additive build up.

Using regular old multi-point particles, emit lots of darkly colored particles with a reasonable multi-radius, a very low opacity and Color Accum enabled in the Attr Editor for the particles. Using a randomized source for rgbPP ( such as rgbPP = rand (<<.01, .01, .01>>, <<.2, .2, .2>>) ) Will help break things up. You can apply the same kind of expression to opacityPP as well.

Another way to go is facing sprites where each sprite gets some random texture with an alpha channel. This is best for smokey effects.

Yet another method is to emit spheres or even blobbies and apply a gassy or smokey looking noise/fractal shader that also has a racing ratio fall off applied to the transparency channel to help hide the sphere's outline.

The latter methods offer the advantage of fewer particles while the first one offers more opportunity for small scale activity and turbulent details. More often than not a really finished looking effect will make use of two or more methods and several passes in order to really build up the complexity.

-jl

[svenip]

i guess the sprite partilces are the best you can do here. simply create 5-10 images in Photoshop with a look of your gas. then create the particle system and assign the images. i've posted a description how to do this a week or two ago here.

with the sprites you make really sure the partilces look like you want it.

[Jhonus]

You could use the theory behind these two links to create something. You'd just have to do some serious shader work ;)
Hope they give you some ideas.

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/davidhofmann1/

Sky (http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/Tmpl/Maya/html/index.jhtml?page=/en/Community/Learn/how_tos/rendering/rendering_m.html#)

[anthonymcgrath]

some of the pfx brushes are pretty cool too! I got some nice subtle mist around the main body of dense particles which was great. you can animate the flow and texture too which is good.

-Dont overlook pfx man - saved my a$$ numerous times!

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.