Hash Effects

#1

Hey all,

My copy should arrive on WEnsday, and it’s a start all over again type situation :). so, a question on Hash’s Effects.

I have an idea for a Ghostbuster page web menu. A 3D Egon Spengler pointing his neutrona wand at the menu items. When a user highlights a menu item, his wand will follow the user. When they click on it, a beam shoots out to highlight the menu item, and it switches over to the next page.

How difficult would it be to get the beam effect, and are there any tutorials on how to do something like that?

Thanks

#2

Sounds like a ton of work. I would just do it in 2D.
If you still wanted to do it in A:M, you could model the plasma stream as just a messy cylinder coming from his gun. ( use the magnet tool to pull out those CPs )
You could then create a material that has a glow to it and apply that to the beam of ecto -plasma - whatever. If you wanted to, you could also animate the material to change color, swirl , etc.

An easy cheat to get the beam to shoot out rather than just appear, would be to to bend the beam outwards ( from the cameras’ vantage point ) and have it gradually straighten out and be visable as it becomes uh… erect. ( just make sure it doesnt cast shadows )

( And yes …I’m a noob, but I noticed no one else posted so … )

good luck !

One more thing : check out Victor Navones’ site www.navone.org His site has an animated feature similar to what you intend to create . I’d say e-mail him about how he did his site, but the guys really busy ( he works for Pixar )

#3

It is probably better to just learn off an internet site like webmonkey or get a book. You can also view the source of the page. I wouldn’t go bothering Victor about that. He may not have even done it himself. Looks like it uses javascript.

I would have thought that D HTML would be a good rout to take for animating the beam. Using AM would be good for making the character and posing him in different positions but animations can take a while to download so you are best off animating as much as pos within the web code.

I can’t give any more advice than that on programing as I am not an expert.

#4

Here’s a quick way to do lightning effects - just make a spline, set it to render as lines and glow in group properties and play around with the randomness setting - the higher the randomness the more the spline will curl around itself like lighning. It’s pretty easy and painless. If you have several of these splines blinking on and off (turn them from “active” to “inactive” every few frames) you ought to get a nice lightning effect.

A toony egon should be easy enough, especially if you only want to use him as a small menu item you needen’t make him too detailed

#5

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