Particle stars

[GateKeeper]

Hello guys,

I've been trying to do an animation of starlike particles flying by a camera much like the effects you would see in Startrek when they are at warp speed.

I've looking for some suggestions on how to approach this.

I was trying to use streak particles and then add a basic white shader and tweak the glow to illuminate them. Hardware render them and then compose them in the final shot with after effects. I was also thinking that it would look nice if I could make each particle a point light and then tweak its various effects to make small stars. But I'm not sure how to map a light to a particle.

Any suggestions?

[ragecgi]

Are you looking for a "pixie-dust" sort of look?

..or are you going for a full-on "warp-drive" look?

Or both effects?

Lemme know, because I have ideas for both:)

[GateKeeper]

Actually I'm going for a full on Warp drive look.
:D

[ragecgi]

Well, there are MANY ways one could achive this effect, and if you do a search on any major 3d site, you will find LOADS of threads describing many 2D and 3D ways to do this.

(EDIT: actually, I just did a search, and I couldn't find any!?? weird! They used to be everywhere!)

Anyway,

One way to do it in Maya (i.e. in 3D) would be to:
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1. Create a directional point emitter.

2. Place your camera in front of the particle stream, (or direct your emit direction toward your cam, either way doesn't matter)

3. Tweak your particle emitter and particle shape so that the particles are emitting in an ever-expanding cone-shape travelling toward your camera.

4. Increase the speed, and rate till you are happy with your star-like particle cone.

5. Add a COLOR dynamic attribute to the particles, and color the RGB values to 255. (bright white)

6. Render it in the hardware renderer using, (HERE IS THE TRICK), multi-pass rendering, (like say 9+ passes or so), and a little (or a LOT) of motion blur. (tweak to taste)

TIPS:
*You don't have to only use a directional emitter.

*Try doing it by emitting particles from a plane using a surface emitter, and the same steps above:)

*To add a sense of depth to the starfield zooming by, you could add a rgbPP attribute to the particles INSTEAD of the basic COLOR per object type.
Then just add a slightly noisy ramp to the default gradient that is created by the particle array mapper.

*That way, the particles in the far-off distance start out dark grey/black and pass your camera at a Bright White color:)
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Another way would be to do it in 2D, like in After Effects or your favorite compositing app.

Hope this helped a little!

[mrmacca]

I did something similar a while back, not exactly a star field but easily modified into one, you can see a low res version Here (http://www.freewebs.com/revert/vortex.avi) Just right click and save as. If you think you can modify it to what you need you can get the scene file from Here (http://www.freewebs.com/revert/vortex_w.rar)

Again just right click to download it.

[ragecgi]

Thanks much for the help and kindness mrmacca!!

[mrmacca]

Well it's not much but it may help a little :)

[ragecgi]

Your movie looks GREAT man!

Care to describe a little bit as to how you were able to do it?

[GateKeeper]

That is a great effect! That is incredibly close to the effect that I'm trying to get.

About the scene file. Is it 4.0 compatible?

[mrmacca]

It's a 4.5 file. If you like i can upload the ma file for you to edit and open in 4.0.

ragecgi, i used a volume emmiter (cylinder). I rotated it 90 in X. I scaled it a bit longer than defualt, 5.45 on frame 1 so the particles are appearing from throughout the cylinder then i animating it's length on frame 120, in y, scaling it back down to about 1.8 so the particles appear as though they are just being emitted from a distance. Set the emitter to emit along the axis only. That was the basic setup. The rate was set about 160. I used Multistreak for the particles with a constant lifespan, then mapped ramps to the opacityPP and rgbPP.

Hope that helps.

[GateKeeper]

If it wouldn't be too much trouble I would really appreciate it if you could upload an .ma file

Boy I feel like I'm falling behind the times! :D

[ragecgi]

Helps a lot m8!

Now the users have more than one way to do it!

Thanks!

[mrmacca]

You can get it Here (http://www.freewebs.com/revert/vortex.ma)

[GateKeeper]

Thank you both for your help.

Just one more question. When dealing with the hardware renderer is it possible to save the sequence as an .avi or .mov so It can be imported into after effects? I can't seem to find an option that will allow me to do that

[mrmacca]

There's no option with the hardware renderer for avi's as it uses your graphics card and just basically takes image captures from your screen. You can render it as a tif or targa sequence and import the sequence into After Effects.

[GateKeeper]

Ah I see. I've saved the images as a targa sequence but I have no idea how to sequence them in After Effects. Can you list the steps please? :beer:

[mtmckinley]

we have a video going over this process using a freebie program called Video Mach. The video is a freebie, too, in the Free Training section. Check for the Render Globals vid.

[GateKeeper]

Thanks Mike! I just watched the video and grabbed Video Mach!

Man that saves me the time of heading to the PC lab on campus!
Thanks again everyone!

[ragecgi]

That's what we are all here for m8!

Good luck!

[GateKeeper]

Okay here we go! Here is the result of this little experiment. I really liked the way it turned out. If you have any thoughts please feel free to post them. :beer:

Now to do the rest of the scene ;)

[NitroLiq]

Nice work, GK! I think the latter part of the animation (front-view flythrough) looks pretty wicked! Just for kicks, if you want to see another way of doing a similar thing, check out this thread:

Starfield (http://forum.simplymaya.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4357&highlight=starfield)

There's a short animated fly-through animation there that I did using paintFX and motion blur. You don't get the long streaks but it works fairly nice for compositing motion through a starfield. Afterwards, I experimented with making a "spaceship-styled" window with alpha channels and composited the fly-through with After Effects. Don't have it anymore but it worked well. :)

[ragecgi]

Nitro, I totaly forgot about that thread dude!

Thanks for the tips m8!