#jpgs
Tim,
>>How did you do the wispy glowing plasma…?
I'll assume you mean the sun images– I explained it a while back in
this thread, but I'll put it up here again for you. It's definitely
quicker than painting by hand, and the resulting animation isn't
rotoscoped-looking. One of the images in DAED2.JPG has a hand
reaching into a white glowing hole. That was created by rotoscoping
over TGAs with Photoshop. Although time- and work-intensive, we
couldn't have done it any other way. OK, the sun and it's flares are
made with the Yost Group's smoke SXP, and the flares are disks that
pass through the spherical sun, using a mask and opacity map that's
basically a white circle with a radial gradient along the edge from
white to black. This lets the animd smoke fade out as it leaves the
sun's surface. And a smoke.sxp mask lets the space between each
tendril be transparent. The sun surface is 3 concentric spheres, one
has the basic texture, the next has sun spots (just played with smoke
until I got that splotchiness), the last is an overall brightening
layer of smoke, applied additively, with the falloff set high, so the
sun is brighter in the center. Whew… the whirly planar gas cloud
around the sun is a Yost Displace'd grid with an opacity map, and
then there's an opacity-mapped sphere that surrounds everything with
a bitmap of one of the NASA nebula images. Beyond that…. is some
stars we made with Scatter, so we could have variable-size stars, and
we could fly through them. I hope that explains it well enough. It
was fun to do.
Eric Chadwick
Mechadeus