comet tail glow

[flatleyld]

I need some help with a project. I built a comet with HV particles coming of the rock of ice. But I can't get the glow in the tail that I need to go along with the particles. Is there a way to have objects emit volumetric light? Please, someone give me some good ideas how to do this. Thanks

[toby]

one way is to have the HV luminous, and use the "corona" post process filter. There is a lot of flexibility in what you can do with the effect, i.e. texture, depth, color, etc.

I've been wanting to tackle a Comet, I'd be interested to see what you come up with

[HowardM]

its simple, make a clone of your HVs, change its HV settings to sprite and tweak the particles size to make a larger glow.

[flatleyld]

here's a still of what I've got so far, Toby. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you think I should change.

[HowardM]

looks cool, nice meteor...is that a model or HV?
so which method did you use?
lets see an animation!
that way we can see how the trail tapers off...as of now it looks a little short...like the particles are just dying off instead of fading away..also add a texture to the glow...they look too blobby and even as of now!
:)

[toby]

nice comet chunk, actually - better than mine was

I think it should have a big cloud around it, there's so much gas coming out of a comet that you can hardly see the rock/ice - it should probably look like a stream of gas instead of 'puffs' - I don't know how to make a nice 'stream' of gas with particles

Actually it's a tough decision whether to use particles, texture maps on geometry, or maybe volumetric lights for the tail - it depends on the look you want -

Here's a real one, it would be pretty hard to do this and might not look as good with particles

[toby]

and here's where I left my POS:
I really wish I could spend some time on it, it's a real challenge

[Edbittner]

Here's a quick one.

[flatleyld]

The reason why my tail looks short is because of my camera angle. I'll tweak it a bit and send a new still. About those volumetric lightsas a tail.... I want to do that too, but I don't know how to get a volumetric light to hug the surface of the ice chunk. That's why I chose to use particles.

By the way, thanks for all your posts to my question, it's much appreciated

[toby]

I haven't tried vol. lights either, but I've done fire with it and I'm sure it could work - assuming it's even neccessary - I did this with plain geometry with gradients and a procedural in the transparency channel. It renders in 2 seconds on my old dual 450. Of course it still needs work, for one thing I used an incidence angle gradient, so if you get close to it and look down it's length it... well, vanishes :D

The new 'surface thickness' gradient would probably be great for this, if I can figure out how to use it...

You seem to be doing a close-up, what occurs to me is that you could make geometry that hugs the comet in the shape of gasses, then animate a procedural in the transparency channel to simulate the motion