Originally posted by arran
sounds interesting - care to expand gster - maybe give examples? 
No probs, for example you can make an electric arc (the kind you see in those dome thingys) by making a curve, adding some noise on it via mel to give it some random like movements, then add a paint fx to it (say the lightening etc) to get a pretty convincing arc.
Or you can make a camera, put a sphere round it make it not renerable, parent it to the camera, make it paintable and then paint some of nice coloured paint FX to it adjust to make it transparent and then render throught the painted sphere to give a dream like effect on what ever the object looking at.
Or another cool one is making a tree "breathe" by painting a animated tree and adjuting the animation using a sine function so the branches move up and down.
Theres lots of examples in the new book I got (that really got me thinking about using paint effects ) Maya Visual effects.
Or in the same book it goes over using ambient occlusion for more than what its generally used for (spookey ghosts, scanning a skull etc etc) as it shades form the distance between the objects, so if you change the colours of the occlusion you can make the dark bits light and the light bits dark, so the closer a object is to say a plane the more you see of it, add a spookey colour to what would be the shaddow and make the white black.....
Hope it gives you some ideas!
"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle
Last edited by gster123; 26-04-2007 at 02:52 PM.