#Vapor.axp
14 messages in this thread
Hello, I just got your IPAS Boutique brochure, and I have a
question about Vapor.axp. I want to create a dust storm which winds
it's way down a valley towards the viewer. It would be from a ground
perspective. It would start far away, move closer and closer, until
it enveloped the viewer. I was wondering if Vapor would be able to
acheive this effect.
Thanks!
Jeff
Jeff,
PMJI, but your question made me curious myself, and I experimented a
*little* with trying to create your desired effect. I assumed you
wanted the dust to be swirling tornado-style, besides achieving the
other dust storm characteristics. Although the vapor emission can be
treated to look similar to a dust cloud, and can be influenced by
secondary motion as well, my simple tests which merely rotated the
axp cube and moved it toward the camera may not be exactly what
you're looking for. The routine lets you use 1 of 3 particle types
which are mapped in various ways, and the mapping is critical to the
effect. Since these are not really 3D particles like spheres spinning
in a force field, rotating the axp is not very convincing for this
effect, and when the axp cube envelops the camera as you desired, you
may not get the effect you're looking for either. Possibly by using a
custom animated opacity map on the vapor particles, you might could
get something close, I don't know. Then again, maybe someone else
could jump in and offer some better advice on achieving this with
Vapor. Otherwise, you might try Blackbox's Vortex routine using
larger intersecting plane particles with opacity mapping ?
BILL
Bill, thanks for that input. I would need the vapor to be a red tint,
and was thinking of using Vapor in conjunction with perhaps Smoke.sxp, and also
fog effects for when the stroem nears the camera. I haven't experimented to
much, so I'm not sure what combinations I would need.
I have a feeling this is going to be quite tricky, but then I guess that
is where all the fun comes in…
Jeff
You're welcome. There's bound to be a number of ways to do this, even without
any IPAS routines if you think about it – with animated opacity maps and
regular geometry. Vapor is great, but probably not the bst choice for this
application.
BILL
How about using animated mattes to dissolve between different versions of
layered fog? With a nice swirling animated matte (as could be created by
smoke.sxp, for instance) and about 4 layers/mattes in all (staggered in time)
you could get some pretty great effects.
– G
That's a good idea, I'll give that a try. Man, there are so many
possibilities here, it's really amazing.
Jeff
gary: how do you make smoke.sxp creat swirling motion. i have tried
very hard to create this effect(like a rotating galaxi cloud….._)
and was not very successful. i got pathces of cloud moving and
changing shape in random paths, but a real swirl along a curved path
and the stretched shape of the clouds in the direction of the path
was imposible to create. let me know if it is possible to do this
with cloud.sxp thanks ara
cloud.sxp? I'm not familiar with that one… is it one of the new
sxp's from the Schreiber folks? Re smoke.sxp, however… its fractal
noise distribution works pretty well for fluidy effects, as can be
seen in the way the smoke moves on the light beam in the flashlight
example file.
gary:
my mistake, i meant smoke.sxp. the problem is creating the stretched
shape of clouds in the direction of the motion.
ara
Bill's observations (again) are extremely on-target. Vapor is ideally
suited to simulating streams of smoke and similar effects. Creating
a dust storm filling the screen and enveloping the viewer is
definitely NOT what vapor was intended to do. Although it may be
possible to use a number of vapor emitters moving in exactly the
right way to get a dust-stormy effect, once it fills any significant
part of the screen it would bring the renderer to its knees, given
all the thousands of layers of overlapping transparency that would be
involved.
jeff:
check into the magic.axp from digimation. it is a new ipas3 that will do
exactly that.
there is a demo flic ind the libs for this axp called magic.zip.
let me know what you think.
ara
Ara, I've seen the magic.zip, is that the one with the flying "star"
with magical "stuff" following it around? That's a cool effect, but would I be
able to create a dust storm with it?
Jeff
jeff:
according to digimation it can creat that effect.
ara