Balrog!!! eventually.
 

Balrog. Now, I am a noob, so I won't be able to make anything like in Lord of the Rings, but I thought that this would be just the kind of huge challenge I need. I never finish these projects, just learn a little, so maybe this will be the one that breaks the records.
Pretty much just the head, basic poly and it emits darkness (particle) and . . . I hope, eventually, fire out of the eyes, nose, mouth etc.
I will have a pic soon, I'm still working on the poly.

Ok, this is the very first and very basic render. I will also put a pic of the 'balrog' without the particles that hes emitted. No skin as of right now . . .

Heres the one without the black emit

I think it needs more Terror; it's looking a bit soft and cute at the moment.

Open up your LOTR menu set, choose the Mines of Moria dropdown list, and choose Terror -> Options Box.

Crank up the Flames, the Evil, and lower the You Shall Not Pass, and then it should start looking good ^_^

lol? Well . . . :D
yeah, I know it doesn't look good right now, I was wondering what else I can do to make him fierce, other than the Mines of Moria dropdown, which I can't seem to find right now, not sure where it went :)...

Flames, visor, fluids or particle? if particle, then emit from object, or emitter? There's so much to do!!!
yeah, he doesn't look fiercesome right now, but I don't know how... any other suggestions? smartass :D ?

Woot.

Again, woot.

re-render, played around with the fire a little. I think its the best so far.
Also to be noted, I've sort of wandered off the path of the balrog, now going for more of a fire demon. I think I know where to go from here, thanks for everything guys!

Have you checked the tut that I sent you?

You might want to change tthe transparancy of the flames as there blocking the model quite a bit

Wooowww :eek: love the fire effect

*Chuckles*

I was kidding ^_^

Anyway, you could indeed use particles; have an emit from object, or even just select the head geometry, and from the Dynamics menu set (yes, that is a real one :p ) choose Effects -> Create Fire.

That'll start you off with really basic particle effects; all you'll need to do is to go into the attribute editor for the fire you just made (if there was nothing else in your scene, particle-wise, it should be called "particleShape1"), scroll all the way down, open up "Extra Attributes," and mess with those numbers a bit.

Maybe up the Fire Scale as you see fit, perhaps even the Spread to between .25 and .45, the Lifespan, and "Fire Density" will be how many particles get emitted, so bring that up to 20-50.

That'll have particles emitting from the entire geometry, so a nifty lil tactic to use is to select a certain few faces you want to have emitting flames, extract them (copy) off the model, keep them in the same place, but apply the fire to those faces only.

When I've messed around with extracting faces, I've ran into a few problems, so just to let you know, watch out for bizzarre parenting and transforms; check your hypergraph to see if there is any parenting to undo, and be sure to freeze the transforms, center the pivot, and clear the history off the duplicated faces.

Unless you are going to be animating the Balrog, in which case, you want the extracted faces to travel WITH the Balrog, and thus you'll want to keep the parenting.

Hope that gets you going on a likeable path ^_^



EDIT:

Forgot to say: having duplicate geometry occupying the same space will cause graphical glithces, as you may have noticed when two faces occupy the EXACT same space. To remedy that, give the extracted faces their own material, and make it 100% transparent, so it can't be seen at all (but still emits particles!).

Why would I have duplicate geometry? Specific options? hmm...
I did the things that you said to the fire, trying to make it longer and more . . . firicious. lol
thanks guys!

Also, thanks Gamester, thats really nice of you to say! (even though I got the flame from the tutorial gster :D ty!)

Gster, I actually liked how the fire obstructed view of the model, cause the model is really basic. :)

Jeez, theres more messing around with big words that I don't understand, like voxel. . . aaack.

Well, the main reason to suggesting having duplicate geometry, is that I'm not sure if it's very easy to control which faces specifically emit particles...like you might NOT want the whole head on fire; you may just want some of the upper/center most faces to be on fire.

Considering this miniscule image:

http://uk.games-workshop.com/moria/l...g-complete.gif

Only it's "spine," and the top of it's head are on fire.

You can use a black and white map for emmiting particles and fluids where you want them, that way you get great control over how much is emmitted and were via a grayscale image.

gster's advice is legit as well; checker ftw ^_^