Land of the lost effects - Surfacing -

[Hieraco]

I am working on re-doing some of my early projects from when I first started LW on the Amiga. One effect that I had that I loved was a sphere with lightening like texture around it. The sphere is partialy transparent where viewed through the thickest part then fades to 100% transparent near the edges.
I called this effect `Plasma Ball' and I want to recreat it on LW 7.5
Any tips? I'm having alot of challenges working with all the new surfacing features.

:confused:

[rsdemon]

On the transparency, you could set a texture so it various the transparency as a function of the camera incidence angle.

Ronald

[drclare]

I think there is a transparent edges shader.

You should probably post questions in the support or mac/pc sections.

[Nick]

rsdemon is on the right track for your problem I think.
to do this open up the texture for the transparency and then change the mode from image map to gradient and then change the effekt from "previus layer" to incidence angle.
you whanted 100% transparent at the edges so that means that
you add one "slice" to the gradient at the bottom and change the top slice to 0%

I'm curent rendering so I cant acces the menues so I might be mistaken in some of the names.
hope this helped you.


AMIGA ROCKS !
later___

[zander]

Here's my attempt. Is this close to what you're looking for?

(The movies are in QuickTime MPG-4 format. If you have QuickTime 6 you should be able to see them. On the PC you might need to change the extension to ".mov")

plasma_spin.mp4 (355 kb) (http://www.bigevilbrain.com/movies/plasma_spin.mp4)
plasma_texture.mp4 (338 kb) (http://www.bigevilbrain.com/movies/plasma_texture.mp4)
plasma.zip (4 kb) (http://www.bigevilbrain.com/movies/plasma.zip)

The "plasma_spin" animation is just a 360 around the "plasma_ball". The "plasma_texture" animation was accomplished by animating the XYZ position (Envelope) of the texture maps.

Good luck!

[Hieraco]

Excellent effect. very close to what I had in mind (must tweek the colours for my personal taste) the only thing is to adjust the drop off towards the edges. Hmmmm Maybe I can make a transparency map and fix it facing the Z+ axis . . . Have to go and play now!

[Hieraco]

Plasma Test Rendering