I've been making recently a ship for EVN using Lightwave and have just managed to render its sprites. The next step for me is to implement engine glows on it.
In order to make these sprites, I turned my whole ship to a black object with no reflection and specularity, and then I created pointlights behind each reactor, but I'm not satisfied with the result at all. Anyone knows how to make beautiful-looking engine glows with LW?
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-signature in development stage; please wait-
Well, there are several ways that this can be accomplished. If you want engine FLAME, you can make a polyagonal object (globe/teslations are good for this) in the general shape of the flame you want (use the magnet tool to shape it properly), give it a fire like texture and make it edge transparent. You could also add an HV 3 displacement map to it and give it a fire tezture with an elongated z axis. You could also work with partigon generation, but in a still render, this is more dificult to get to look great (works well an animaton). If you are looking for a non-flame type object you could do an hypervoxel/null combination to simulate a plasma ball type thing, or you could do an edge transparent polygon that has the same effect. In either of these two methods, you want to create a point light with a lense flare (that has no rings, just a central glow, and has fade behind objects, make the light have no intensity itself, and the lense flare of a relitively low intensity.) Then you will want to position these flares at the focal point of the engine glow/flame. I am not agt my comp right now, so I may have not been as complete as I could have been if I could have booted Lightwave. Hope this helps, and good luck.
Joe
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