#57 - Animation - Engine Particles

Creating these particles was a long and painful process. I had to try many different techniques before I achieved something that worked in the renderer. In fact I can't remember them all, but I spent a long time finding tutorials that actually showed me how to use particles instead of fluids, then these tutorials would be rubbish anyway. It took forever to get the particles to be textured in some way.

I first created an emitter and set it to have a volume emitter type with a cloud particle render type. I used the parent constraint tool to attach it to the Venator and luckily this time it worked. I added a dynamic colour attribute and set RGB values to 50, 20, 225 to create a bluish flame colour. The colour was fine, and it renders in Maya Software (but not Maya Hardware), but clearly the flame cloud is too big.


To fix this, I set the emitter type to directional and reduced the lifespan and the radius of the particles. It is not a perfect flame shape, but it looks close enough. The emitter is rotated at a strange angle as well and I cannot fix this without setting a key frame yet, which would break the parent constraint to the Venator. I tried to duplicate the emitter and move them into the other engines, but it would not duplicate the actual particles, so I will try making them all manually again, now that I know which settings to add.




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