#Hollywood electricity
18 messages in this thread
Does anyone have any info. on how to do the Hollywood style electric effects
which have arcs of electricity traversing a person. It's a fairly common effect
so it can't be too difficult. I'm really needing to accomplish this within 3DS
so if anyone has any tips it would be great if you could share.
Thanks
DM
>Does anyone have any info. on how to do the Hollywood style electric effects
which have arcs of electricity traversing a person. It's a fairly common effect
so it can't be too difficult. I'm really needing to accomplish this within 3DS
so if anyone has any tips it would be great if you could share.<
Since those effects are usually a 2D process I'm hoping you will be able to do
it with LenZFX Inferno when it ships. Basically it is a glow around a jagged
shapped line, so I don't see a reason why it couldn't be done. I don't know if
the current LenZFX could handle it as aura/glow has object sensing problems
that are supposed to be improved in the new version.
Thanks Tim, Yes LenzFX can create a glow around an object just fine in it's
current version. You just have to use a mask to control it. I tried using
Schreibers lightning but was not impressed with it. I could see using it for
background lightning but that's it. It's just too fake looking for anything
else. Hand Painting is the way to go if you want to control the lightning.
Anyway, thanks for the tips.
DM
>Hand Painting is the way to go if you want to control the lightning.<
I d/l'ed a demo of WinImages and it does lightning, glows, flames, arua, and
other images effects. They can be animated over time.
The way I do it is to paint the effect as a 2d flic in AniPro then map the
flic onto an extra object as a transparency map. Use glow or Lensfx to
complete the effect.
Ian.
Thanks Ian, handpainting the effect is exactly how I'm doing it. It's very easy
actually and produces a perfectly controllable arc.
DM
>>Thanks Ian, handpainting the effect is exactly how I'm doing it. It's very
easy actually and produces a perfectly controllable arc.
Yeah, Its easier than it sounds.
Ian.
Dave, I'm getting pretty good electric effects by combining sliced/skin very
think gnarly wire shapes and well placed PLASMA cubes. If you reduce the Plasma
Arcs to two and place the bounding box well you can get very good control of
direction and size. In combination with the hide/unhide and grouping the skin
wires it looks pretty hi-end. If the luminance/color is distinct enough you can
GLOW in one session, directly within your scene. Otherwise you have to run the
effect alone and composite in post. One really nice thing about running the
effect alone is alpha key choice. I obviously rely on the Yost Disks here,
never bought LenzFX. Tell you one thing though, the Yost routines render field
very well and the effect does not take much time to set up. Jeffrey
Thanks for the reply Jeffrey. Your solution using skin/slice sounds interesting
though difficult. For this project I'm going to handpaint the effect using
AniPro and then use that as a mask in LenZFX to control the glow. It's not too
much work hand painting – about 180 frames – and it so controllable. I'm using
shades of gray to make the effect look 3D. So far it's coming out beautifully.
If I get this job (just a bid right now) I'll ul the finished piece as a .flc.
Oh, and yes, YG's Disk #1 has saved me many times when LenZFX couldn't. But, I
have to say YG's flare is no comparison. I get a kick out of comparing the two
actually. LenZFX flares are just beautiful. Anyway, I sure would like to see
your electric effect if it's possible. It sounds very cool. Any chance?
DM
Dave,
I would like to see the electric effect too, when you get a chance.
Thanx
Mark
Hey Mark, What ever happened to that mail I was getting from you? I just wanted
to let you know about this lightning thing again. I've finished it and do have
it as a .flc (just the lightning part) but it's still big. 2.3Mb zipped. I'll
upload it if anyones interested in seeing it. It's Lightning shooting down and
revealing the clients logo. It's all hand painted and glowed with YG's Disk #1
Glow. It turned out well but I think it might be too big to put on C$. Let me
know.
DM
I would like to see it, can you upload it to me? If you have an internet
account send it to webmaster@syntellect.com I am at www.syntellect.com – I
remember reading about this and the effect sounded cool!!
Thanks Paul Boyd – Phoenix
Could you maybe reduce the resolution a little. That might make it smaller.
I'm interested in seeing it.
Jason
Dave,
I would very much like to see it. Do you have someplace I could upload it from?
Or, will_tait@intuit.com
Thanks,
Will
Why not use Smacker and compress the flic down even further? You should be able
to get it down to about 1/6th of the size with a high quality image.
-Peter
Dave;
>> I'll upload it if anyones interested in seeing it.
I believe it is free for you to upload (at least it used to be). If you do
upload it, everyone will have a chance to see it (if they feel they can afford
to download it). If not, then it is their loss.
I would like to see it. FWIW.
Thanks,
Dennis
Dave,
Sorry about the delay, I'll try and get something to you this week. I've been
under a crunch getting videos produced.
Also, go ahead and upload! I've seen bigger files…
Mark
Dave, I'll have a piece I've been working on done in about an other month.
There are a number of examples of how i used skin/slice in conjunction with
Plasma and Glow to get all sorts of elctricity and highly conductive surfaces
(snap, crackle, pop -*- ouchie -*-. Will give you a look-see then. This project
has taken me about 6months and I want to get on to something else already.
Jeffrey