I've got a small project that I'm doing for one of my friends short movies. He has a scene where he needs me to animate a fireball to fly across the screen. So I have a few questions. I've never done any animating what so ever. But I'm assuming using key frame animation, it shouldn't be too hard to make a simple object fly across the screen. I did mess around with animating materials - but not objects. I created an animated water material with Ajax's help a few months back. My question is, is would it be hard to animate? My second question is this. Is there anyway to make the fireball appear to be glowing? I think I'm going to make several fireball props nested in one another and maybe have the outer be orange/yellow and the inner ones fade to blue or some such. I'm using P6, and I think it would be best to do all the texture work in the material room. That would make it easiest to animate etc. Every material setting I've used just makes it look flat and dull. I even tried the fire materials supplied with P6.

start with a series of nested spheres. make the smallest a nice color and boost the ambient. make the next spheres mostly transparent and add a cloud texture , use the texture as transparency map as well. if you want a trailing tail of fire use a cone attached to your spheres. You can animate the textures as well as the object motion. If you know someone with lightwave you can do a nifty fireball using particles.

blender (ya cheap) makes really great fireballs if done right has particals in it too, but materials are more limited, like P4 in P6 that "glow" is ambient value in mat room id do 5 spheres, each with a cone tail, each set slightly bigger than the one inside it (maybe 10-15%?) blender node mixing 1 cloud node on top with other going to a math node, which has multiply and fbm node on top, marble node below blender node plus into ambient/trans/diffuse play with values and nice fireball :)

Besides the suggestions above, you might try ParticleIllusion from WonderTouch
If you are doing a lot of effects animations, this program is more than worth it's price.

-AniMajik - PoserFilms.com

Message edited on: 04/12/2005 23:50

Attached Link: Download P5 animated shaders and movies of them.

Well, I'm going to disagree with the other guys and say that all you really need is one low polygon sphere (no nesting of multiple spheres needed). You can use a magnet to give it a bit of a tail if you want. Making the sphere fly across the room is no problem. All the interesting stuff happens in the material room. The trick to avoid the nesting is to use the edge blend node to control ambience and transparency. That way you'll get a very smooth falloff to the edges, instead of getting that multi layered effect you get with nested meshes. It renders faster too, since it doesn't have to deal with so many transparent layers. You may need to filter the edge blend node through a math node or two to get the right sort of blend between opaque and transparent areas. The other thing you need to do is to animate the fire itself so it gives an appropriate effect on screen and that's done using the usual approaches to animating the 3D texture nodes (I really must get around to writing up a tute on this stuff soon). The link above goes to a 7 meg download with a few animated shaders and a bunch of movies showing what they look like. There are a couple of animated fire shaders, so you should be able to get some ideas from those. Another way to make animated fire effects is to use MetaForm, but if you don't already have it you probably don't want to spend that much for a one off project. It's a great tool though.

Hadouken?

And don't forget Particles 2, also sold at DAZ. Quite a bit cheaper than Metaform - a very nice tool.

Actually I do already own Metaforms. I just don't use it that often, as I don't have a lot of time. I've checked their site in the past for tutorials, but they only have them for things like setting characters on fire and the like. How would you go about creating a fireball using metaformz?

Hmmm...probably just like setting a character on fire, except you'd use a sphere instead of a character.

It really just depends what look you're after, I guess. The MetaForm look may not be what you want.