making the engine fx

[Racer48]

hello everyone

I want make the engine fx for an spacenuke.

1. How can make this short trail coming direct from the blast pipe.
Of course I have tried to use volumetric lights but when Iam using textures I don´t get the right geometry.
I will not use this when I am taking the 3. effect described below.



2. How can I create realistic dust trails?



3. How can I create this "hot air" on the inner surface of the engine?
I have tried transparency voxels with a refraction factor but the result didnt´t look ok.



Now to the Attachments:

The first image is a picture taken from the advanced air plane texture tuturial taken from militarymeshes.com. The particles look good in my eyes for using for the 3. effect.
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The second and third image is my fx so far.

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Please watch the best of BSG season ONE video. At 00:08-00:11 you can see this blue ship called olymipic carrier from back seen from a viper cockpit. Its the ship with 1 big and 3 smaller thrusters. They are all blue.

Needs flash
http://www.zoicstudios.com/Web/Creations/Showcase.aspx?FileView=awards&ShowID=29&ReelID=36&CurrentFileType=Flv

[Racer48]

sorry, I forgot to tell you that you can see the hot air engine fx at 00:08-0011 not only 4 blue thrusters when you follow the link.




And here is a different pic of my engine fx:

[Racer48]

No one that can help me?
I mean this ship


Whatch the trailer I link for to see the animation.

[jcaesar]

I think it's done in multiple passes and via compositing--I think that's how Zoic goes about it.

In general:

First get your lighting and stuff done, and get a background plate (image series).

Next add particles coming out of the engine, and render them into an alpha map sequence.

Composite them and use the particle alpha map applied to a distortion operator.

That way you can control the amount of distortion without a lot of re-rendering.