railgun smoke trail

[cspears2002]

For a personal project, I'm trying to create the railgun smoke trail seen in the movie "Eraser". I finally have a trail roughed out. Two problems I have noticed:

1) The smoke is chunky instead of wispy. This is probably caused by my sprite shader. Any ideas on how to overcome this problem?

2) The smoke should become more transparent over time. I probably need to accomplish this effect with the Color POP.

Any other hints, criticisms, etc. would be greatly appreciated!

bullet_v07_with_sprites.hipnc

[old school]

1) The smoke is chunky instead of wispy. This is probably caused by my sprite shader. Any ideas on how to overcome this problem?

Your sprite shader was referenced on disk and not found. I worked on the other sprite shader in the sprite SHOP.

You need way more sprites.

Use Deep shadow maps from a light. Don't forget to blur the shadow map somewhat.

Try randomly rotating the sprites in POPs and randomizing the scale. All done in the Sprite POP.

2) The smoke should become more transparent over time. I probably need to accomplish this effect with the Color POP.

First you need to really cut the opacity down on the shader. I dropped it down to 0.15 and rely on the deep shadow map to add the depth. Sort of like a poor man's volume render.

You can use a Color POP and inherit the alpha. Or you can create your own attribute (based on $LIFE in this case) and use the Color POP to previs the opacity but have the shader inherit this custom attribute to do the opacity fade off in the shader.

See the attached file.

Don't forget to add the custom attribute to the sprite procedural attribute list.

bullet_v07a_with_sprites.hipnc

[cspears2002]

Your sprite shader was referenced on disk and not found. I worked on the other sprite shader in the sprite SHOP.

You need way more sprites.

Use Deep shadow maps from a light. Don't forget to blur the shadow map somewhat.

Try randomly rotating the sprites in POPs and randomizing the scale. All done in the Sprite POP.

First you need to really cut the opacity down on the shader. I dropped it down to 0.15 and rely on the deep shadow map to add the depth. Sort of like a poor man's volume render.

You can use a Color POP and inherit the alpha. Or you can create your own attribute (based on $LIFE in this case) and use the Color POP to previs the opacity but have the shader inherit this custom attribute to do the opacity fade off in the shader.

See the attached file.

Don't forget to add the custom attribute to the sprite procedural attribute list.

bullet_v07a_with_sprites.hipnc

Thanks! I'm going to crack open the file and take a look! If you are interested, I have made some progress with volumes if you want to take a look. Need to figure out how to make the volumes disappear gracefully...

bullet_v09_volume_remove_time.hipnc