#Great Gas
6 messages in this thread
Has anyone figured out how to make the excellent streaks of "space
gas" as seen in Babylon 5? I've been experimenting with various
textures and fog object effects but so far the effect has been
comparitively feeble. Nebulas are fairly easy, but those
streaks…ugh! Any sugestion would be appreciated.
If you've got Forge and Essence2 there's an easy way to make a
nebula. Start with the cyclone texture and render out a grayscale
image of it. This will be a transparency map. You should make sure
that the cyclone size is smaller than the window so it will have a
completly black background all the way around it. I use no twist for
the cyclone. This gives a nice blotchy cloud. You then make it a
negative with Adpro or similar program. This will make the outer
parts of the image fully transparent and the cloud in the center
semi-transparent. I suppose you could also render the image with a
white background and make the cloud color black so you didn't have to
make the image a negative. Once you have the image you map it onto a
square, flat plane as a filter map. Add some fractal color. (medium
red and dark blue seem to look good) Now stretch the plane in one
direction. (at least 2X on the 'X' axis) This will stretch the image
and give you a more streakish nebula. I've used this system with
LightWave and found that it gives better results than most of the
fog-object Imagine nebulas I've seen.
Note: There was a bug in Imagine 2 that wouldn't render starfields
through transparent objects although It may have been fixed in
Imagine 3.
I think I might have uploaded the LightWave nebula object into the
Amigaarts/3D library. While the object isn't usable with Imagine the
image is a good starting point. (the object is just a flat plane)
Thanks Jeff,
Actually I've done something very similar, except I used Impulses NEBULA
texture. With this I've made pretty convincing exploded looking clouds.
Its really a different look though from Babylon 5's gas clouds.
They are long and have the look of streams of gas being "pulled" (if
that makes any sense). The only thing about B5 is every space scene
has one of these, and cool as they may be it's hard to imagine so
much gas could exsist in space! I've been toying with ghost objects
and combineing these with texture mapping but so far nothing. Thanks
for your input — SGinNJ
We do gas streaks by drawing them in a paint program (Fractal Painter
on the PC, usually) and then using the resulting image as a color
and/or transparency map.
One point of view is that there seems to be a lot of nebulas in
Babylon 5. When you consider that nebulas can be hundereds of light
years across you'd think that you'd see a cloud whichever direction
you were looking if you were in an area with a lot of dust. I always
thought that the nebulas in Bab5 were too small and dense to look
real. (perhaps the dust is ionized by ships passing through the area
at high sublight speeds and it pulls together.) ;^)
Dont get me wrong Jeff, I think they look great (hense the subject
name!). But of all the TV sci-fis I've seen, B5 is the only one with
nebulas everywhere. Star Trek for example has very few, DS9 almost
none. I guess B5 has lots cause they can, its probably a pain making
that effect in the real world but in 3D they're just another object.
Last night I tried streching my nebula plane along the X axis to
expand it and it worked fairly well, although compared to B5 its not
impressive.
Anyway, it seems transparency maps are the popular answer, guess I
better bone up on my outer space illustration techniques. SGinNJ