CompuServe Thread

>>i downloaded your suns image. wowwww, it IS NICE!!! can you give me some idea as to how you achieved: 1) the solar flames and flares? 2) the large cloud disk(white/orange)with the SWARLY! clouds? please let me know i am very interested. again, very nice job on this image!<< Ara, Glad you liked it. Wish I could upload the anim, but it's too big. The suns are self-illuminated spheres, and the solar flares coming off around the suns are made with self-illum flat disks, oriented to face the cam. The gas cloud is a self-illum displacement-mapped grid. The red nebula behind it all is a self-illum flipped-normal sphere with a textrue and opacity map. And behind that is the Yost Group stars_2.sxp with motion blur turned on. The flares were mapped this way: TEXTURE1=the Yost Group IPAS smoke_i.sxp with the colors reversed. OPACITY= a radial grad (basically a white circle with a gradation from white to black at the edges), and the opacity map is masked by the smoke_i.sxp. With the radial grad, the colored smoke's opacity fades out as it gets farther from the surface of the sun. With the sxp masking the opacity map, only the smoke itself is opaque, while the space in between the tendrils is transparent, showing the background. The swirly gas cloud I painted in Photoshop, then used the Yost Group IPAS displace.pxp to create a lofted mesh using the map (similar to how GIFDXF works). It then has the map as an opacity map, with another color grad from yellow to blue as the texture map. Lots o work to get it right. You can see the full results in an up and coming PC CDROM game from Mechadeus and Media Vision due out Xmas 94 called The Daedalus Encounter. Eric Chadwick Mechadeus