General Category > General Anim8or Forum
Creating Sphere Mesh as a Flashing Landing Light on a Model - Question
Trevor:
Agreed, You don't want a sphere here, you want sprites.
You can also do it via "volumetric" sprites (see lightsaber)
Trev
Bman:
Hi Trevor, good to see you here. Are you talking about this thread topic? http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php/topic,946.0.html
Not quite sure what you mean by "volumetric" 2D-sprites. Sorry I plead some ignorance. What I'm trying to do is create flashing landing lights like you see on commercial airline planes. But specifically for the top dorsal wing and bottom hull of the Lambda Class Shuttle. The only way I've been able to get the game engine to not cast a shadow behind the sphere mesh when a light source is coming from any direction, is to just use a plain white texture (no alpha channel) and set the color white to full illumination either via Optech or Jeremy's new editor. Thoughts?
Oh, so maybe multiple spheres each a slightly larger than the other with a fading "white" transparency and have black as the transparency ??? :-)
Trevor:
Wow, that thread is exactly the method I used for my lightsaber - though independently thought up despite that thread existing before I created my lightsaber (2010)
Layers of spheres would have heavy banding on top of heavy poly usage.
"volumetric Sprites" - that lightsaber - is the way to go (ok, volumetric sprites might actually mean something else, but this is what I meant by it)
Trev
Bman:
Trevor, I searched for your post you are referring to, but I don't think it exists anymore.(?) Direct link ?
Anyway, in the mesh image shown below (un-textured at the moment) is what I tested with one of the above Lights.png texture map on each intersecting plane. But I think I need to use the "two-sided" texture mapping feature in Anim8or for each plane, before I export to .3ds format. I've also wondered if scaling the applied texture map has any significance. (?)
In the game environment, I rotated the model around and it appeared the back side of some planes were transparent because the game engine thinks that the face normals exist on the textured side. Also, I had deleted the sphere enveloping the planes, but if I fill in the faces of the sphere and map a pure transparent black texture to the entire sphere, that might allow the shadow property applied from any random light source to fall on the opposite side of the enveloping sphere (which is invisible anyway) and not affect the interior planes. The only other cosmetic effect left is maybe add a 90 degree plane at the bottom or center of the intersecting planes (inside the sphere) so you see the flashing light effect looking up from below the model.
I'm still not clear about volumetric 2d/3d sprite objects or how to do that. Game engine is 3d flight simulation game using 3d meshes/objects. I read some threads about lightsaber blades and making concentric cylinders, but you're right that it adds a higher poly face count if I did it with multiple spheres... and color banding effect. Wanted to test what Selden wrote too about UV tool's "Spherical projection". Wasn't aware of that.
selden:
Are you willing to specify the game engine that you're working with?
Is it available for download somewhere?
Sometimes fresh eyes looking at a program's specifications can discover something that's been overlooked.
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