i have a question (i hope this is the right forum of this)
 

i want to make a affect of a sheild that looks like a thick water/jello affect hehe(i dont know how to describe it)or like that stargate wormhole effect)thin also make ripples when an object passes thru it


i have no idea how hard this is or how stupid it sounds(this is for a barrier between space and the ship) in something i'm working on hehe


~TJ~

this is the right forum, but unfortunately i am not the right person to supply you with an answer.

but i would not suggest a stargate thing as barrier between ship and space - fluids wont work so good w/o gravity. maybe just an energy field (a simple plane), that is mostly transparent and has some animated noise.

softbodies and fields is the first thing that pops to my mind, for doing this thing. . .

I've seen rippling water-type surfaces done with softbodies and I think radial and/or air fields. The fields were parented to the object passing through.

Also, MAYA's built-in water texture has riple settings. You can layer a few of them one over the other with a plus-minus-average node that plugs into the material's bump map. I've tried this myself once and it's pretty cool. It takes some doing to animate the timing of the ripples if there ara a lot, but I'd hazard a guess that it's more controllable than softies and is a quicker render too. Downside: the surfaces doesn't actually deform.

:beer: