Grand Space Opera 3D Entry: Michael Crawford

#181

hi Michael…
i got your idea about effect…
here are few examples of seamless sun animations i made for one game… videos are very low quality but i hope you can get a general idea from them… i think your trying to do something similar… cos they were made to simulate dense suns i didn’t use any fall-off in the textures… also no particles used… three spheres inside each other and transparency maps… curls and glows are ‘video post’ effects in max… original files are very high quality… also using fall-off for sphere’s transparency maps will make them look exactly like plasma matter…

i want to finish modeling and texturing my Frigate model first… i hope to finish them within 3-4 days… and after that i’ll immediatly start making ‘Temptation’ fireballs…i have absolutely similar task as you so we can try to develop them helping each other… :slight_smile:

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cheers…

#182

Hey Paul - those samples looks great, sorry for hijacking Michaels thread but could you elaborate on how you did the videopost part?

#183

i’m sorry Gunilla, but i can’t post original max files cos the game, i made this animations for, is still in development… but believe me the technique used is very simple… and i don’t want to spend a time for elaborating it cos for sure i’ll post a lot of screen shots of WIPs of my plasma fireballs… some kind of tutorial… and for them i’m going to use much more advanced and complex technique, including all tips i used for sun animations as well… just give me a time… i hope to start making them next week… i just have to finish Frigate ship…
thank you for your interest and sorry again… :slight_smile:

#184

Yippee! We’re back in business! :slight_smile: Today I made some huge strides on getting the plasma effect to work properly, but thought I’d go ahead and post the “first steps” in this experiment, so you can see just how much progress I’ve made today. Getting closer to being happy with it … and you’ll see why shortly.

#185

Wow man this fireball looks really awesome and the way that you explain your experience and your test is great. When this challenge is over , you need to gather all the images that you put in the contest and make some kind of booklet with all your exp, about it .

Keep the hard work and thanks for the support , more updates coming soon in my thread
:thumbsup:

#186

Paul, I downloaded the Quicktime animations and took a look. They’re quite good, and similar to some test animations I made using the “cigartte smoke” and a similar nested-sphere approach a couple of years ago, so I agree completely that your suggestion would be the way to go for an animated sequence – it would render so much faster than the dense particle version as to make the choice a no-brainer.

I need to go into Photoshop and put together a sample of today’s renders, but the really good news is I was able to figure out the right settings to reduce the render time to just a few minutes per image and get the swirling particles into the mix. (I also did one rather interesting render with my “Techno HiperGlass” shader network that took about four hours to render due to all the shaders involved, but makes for a rather interesting approach nonetheless.)

Again, many many thanks for all the help and input on figuring out how to make this kind of thing work. I’m sure that once you get around to working on your own plasma fireballs that I’ll be able to pick up some invaluable pointers!

#187

• Super Mega Cool! Getting there uh?

Getting closer to being happy with it … and you’ll see why shortly.
Man! that sounds scary! :scream: :thumbsup:

#188

Adrian, I was pretty happy with the edges of the one on the right, but had the “static blur” setting so high that the render time was about thirty minutes (!), and the yellow was almost completely lost. :frowning: However, I figured out that by generating a LOT of much smaller particles and keeping the blur low – less blur needed because the particles were smaller – and the falloff very high (in the 50-60 range) I could get a satisfactorily “diffuse” band along the edges while maintaining better color in the interior portion. Will post those renders in just a few minutes.

#189

Here are some of today’s refinements, working in a particle swirl and testing settings in order to achieve a lower render time.

#190

• It was worth waiting your 30 rendering minutes Michael, looks heat! It may be also a good idea to put some outcoming rays
• Maybe also “deforming” its shape, I mean maybe more irregular just a bit to give a boiling plasma feeling

This effects looks great, i wonder why i didn’t thought in incorporating something like this in my own pic! :thumbsup:

#191

looking really great Michael , need to find some spare time to work with particles and see how powerful are in XSI. :thumbsup:

keep rockin my friend

#192

Omar: I will definitely test out some volumic lighting to improve the sense of radiant energy, just haven’t gotten around to incorporating that part. And if that doesn’t work to my satisfaction, I’ll take it into Combustion and massage the image with Trapcode’s “Shine” plugin, which is just about the best plugin investment I’ve ever made. And that’s an excellent point about modifying the shape to give it more irregularity; I’ll test that out tonight. Thanks!

Adrian: The particles in XSI are sort of a “good news, bad news” thing. The “good news” is that there’s a lot you can do with them once you start thinking “outside the box”; the “bad news” is that they’re nowhere near as flexible as you’d like them to be as far as connecting other shaders to their nodes. If Softimage can correct that, then they’ll be a step closer to having the same kind of procedural flexibility as Houdini’s particles. The “blob” shader – the default shader for fluids – comes the closest to being able to give really amazing results, as when you combine particles with metaball principles, and then add in the ability to blend textures (this was the thing that impressed me the most), you get something that can be used for constructing really amazing organic shapes in a fraction of the time it would take to model them using conventional means. The one thing that would make this approach tremendously powerful is if you could do something like “convert fluids to mesh.” Now that would be just awesome!

#193

More of today’s work. I’m now in the process of seeing how the plasma ball looks in the context of various containment vessels. This image is the wireframe for the next render I’ll be posting.

#194

Back to testing containment fields. While I really like this effect, and feel it’s probably closer to a “realistic” approach (in that it cuts down enough of the luminous output of the plasma ball that working around it wouldn’t be an impossible situation), it does rather defeat the purpose of this exercise by masking what should make for an interesting visual touch. Sigh. Perhaps by cutting a “peephole” in the container …? Well, still time to try out various approaches, now that I’ve settled on how I’m going to make the rest of Waterhole Alpha make better visual sense. (Yes! I have a plan!) :slight_smile:

#195

thanks michael for the explanation about particles .

the last update is perfect , nice colors , textures and shaders. Keep the hard work :thumbsup:

#196

Oh my! Your last updates looks stunning! The plasma ball is spectacular and the containment vessel…Hope you find a way to use it! Perhaps you could make it as wide bars - leaving wide gaps empty?

Really, really good so far - keep it up!

#197

Hi Michael,

Your results are as always very impressive. The mixture between textures and polygons are great. I can´t reply often because unfortunatley I can´t participate in this work in progress because the content goes to deep into 3d knowledge which I don´t have. I just watch wondering.

Greetings
Fahrija

#198

Michael! I am so in awe at the knowledge and skill you posess in regards to shaders and particles. I especially like the format that you present your work to the rest of us, very informative and inciteful. It’s all coming along nicely and thanks again for sharing your thoughts as that’s a big help for the rest of us in learning the art that you already master so well.
Keep up the excellent work!
Alex.

#199

Hey great work so far. The last render looks really good. Keep up the good work.

btw… since you use Darktree … check this out
http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=6;action=display;threadid=15579
:slight_smile:

#200

As expected Michael! :applause: