Anim8or Community

I had already figured out how to do the planet's crust melting (it's not Earth.). I've known how to do the effect since I worked on an earlier project, Xprrrah System (don't ask) where a massive (Earth-sized) space station melted a planet. I had one object that was the planet and a second one where the planet was melted. I simply expanded the molten sphere. I later edited that out as I wanted to try it with Terragen, but still later (months) my computer crashed and I had to get my hard drive wiped and Windows installed again. In the process, I lost EVERYTHING.
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For the jet of energy, I wanted to show it from many angles and thus make it 3D. Anyway, for the explosion, I wanted to simply have it expand into a bright fireball, accompanied by sound effects, then have it shrink and emit a huge shockwave that hits the camera, then use WMM effects to fade to white and fade to the scene with a debris field replacing the planet. The problem I need a solution for is the jet fanning out after hitting the planet. All the other stuff I know how to do already.

Or you just use a cilinder...
To make a laser: Make like three/four cilinders, the one a bit bigger then the other. Then make some materials (three or four again) give those give emissive values and various transparencies ie: 0.75, 0.5, 0.25. Place them inside each other and you got yourself a laser. This technic probablywont work that good in ART i think, since ART isn't that good with transparent things. But in scanline it looks fine.

I've done a (slightly modified) version of that technique to make rocket exhaust, planetary atmospheres, lens flares, comets, volcanic plumes, stellar coronae... I could go on and on about all the stuff I've used that for. Only I do it a bit differently: I make the base object (usually a sphere or slightly displaced sphere), then the material, and copy/paste scaling up the model by a factor of 1.01 and do it over and over until I have the right effect, usually using a transparency of 0.01-0.05.

I can't afford the site right now so I had to let it go.

What about Google Sites. It's free, and I have a site there.

Does the reflection have to be that of something in the scene, or can it be sort of a window to another scene?

I'd like support for PNG and animated GIF textures.

It's been finished for a loooooong time now. I had tried the Terranim8or method, and it was too easy (but good!) and I wanted to challenge myself with a morph target explosion. I ended up going with Terranim8or for my project. I was making a planetary explosion.

This is what I meant. Square textures in this post, disk textures in the next.