Rendering particles

[mohrag]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to create a plasma blast, similar to the halo grenade, or the harry potter spell battle: 

I considered just rendering the pyro straight out with custom colours, but I wasnt getting a good look from it.
I've used POPs, and advected the particles by an explosion sim, and am now trying to render. I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to shaders, so currently, i'm just using a basic constant with alpha set to 1-$AGE attribute. This is my current look:

It looks very particulate-y, was hoping for more of a together look...

Does anyone have any helpful ideas/tips that could work? For either POPs or pyro shaders. 

Thank you in advance

[tricecold]

post render effects will be the finisher for this effect imho. 

[mohrag]

Thanks! I wondered about this, I knew I'd have to glow in comp, but I should blur it a bit too?

[Neil78]

Yeah - also try and think in terms of layers...

 

so a gentle smoke sim - using a generic smoke shader - basic smoke - and imagine this comped with the particles.....

 

Play around with glows / blurs / even Z depth info to drive CC'ing.....

[mohrag]

Ah yes, layers! I was planning to add an extra fluid driven layer, but you're right, adding a smoke sim would help loads - thank you!

[whodini]

you could try using lines instead of points, by setting the particle shape type to lines. or even a little motion blur can go a long way.

[mohrag]

I'll try lines instead of points today- thank you! I was using motion blur, maybe I should increase it a bit.

[pbarua]

You could also try higher particle count and Render As Points is only point under Geometry>Render>Geometry tab with lower Point scale.

[whodini]

using lines instead of motion blur can be faster too. and if you want the transparency that you get with motion blur, you can calculate the length (magnitude) of the points and fit it between a 0-1 value and use that as alpha. This way fast maving lines get just a little bit of transparancy and slow moving lines are fully opaque.

[narbuckl]

Heyo,

 

          I worked on some of these effects (among others) on Harry Potter 7, judging from your render you simply need a lot more particles with a lot smaller radius. Nearly all of those effects were done the same way, advecting millions of points through fluid sims (maybe with some added noise), then with comp glow added in Nuke. It depends on how far from the camera you are, you can also get clever with fading opacity/alpha attributes on age and/or rendering the fluid sim and lightly adding it too the comp if its high enough res. I would also recommend wedging the simulation so you have several variations that you can then add together in comp, or the mantra render with delayed load shaders if you have the ram for it.

 

-Nathan

[NSugleris]

Heyo,

 

          I worked on some of these effects (among others) on Harry Potter 7, judging from your render you simply need a lot more particles with a lot smaller radius. Nearly all of those effects were done the same way, advecting millions of points through fluid sims (maybe with some added noise), then with comp glow added in Nuke. It depends on how far from the camera you are, you can also get clever with fading opacity/alpha attributes on age and/or rendering the fluid sim and lightly adding it too the comp if its high enough res. I would also recommend wedging the simulation so you have several variations that you can then add together in comp, or the mantra render with delayed load shaders if you have the ram for it.

 

-Nathan

 

Thanks for sharing, I figured it's much more cost effective to do a lot of these effects with fluid advected particles.