Special Unit Effects

[Ares de Borg]

Maybe you could ask Wyrm if he could support you with some animations as a basis... his explosions and especially his torpedo wake effect are very good and far, far superior to the firaxis animations.

 

[Gary Childress]

Maybe you could ask Wyrm if he could support you with some animations as a basis... his explosions and especially his torpedo wake effect are very good and far, far superior to the firaxis animations.

Thanks Ares. I may have to give that a try. I've been trying to create some explosion effects for the Blockbuster animation but I'm having a hard time coming up with a satisfactory one.

 

[Wyrmshadow]

Thanks Ares. I may have to give that a try. I've been trying to create some explosion effects for the Blockbuster animation but I'm having a hard time coming up with a satisfactory one.

Sometimes it takes many hours to get it jsut right but here is how I do it. Remember the old Simpson's episode where Marge paints and takes some art classes then paints Mr. Burns naked? The teacher was voiced by Jon Lovitz, where he explained using the 'Lombardo Method" where everyting is made up of a combination of shapes, spheres cones and cubes and such. Bryce works the same way. Watch a bunch of videos until you start seeing all the simple shapes that make up the complex actions that is an explosion. Toruses for shockwaves and a lot of firely and smokey spheres for the fireball.

 

[Gary Childress]

Thanks for the tips Wyrmshadow!

When you make an explosion about how many polygons go into a typical one? I had been trying to create a blast out of two or three expanding spheres or cones using cloud type volumes in Bryce. Even that seems to eat up a lot of system resources unless I set it to a really low detail level. Also do you use Bryce to do most of your explosions or is there a better program for that?

 

[Wyrmshadow]

nope.. 100% of my animation is in Bryce.

 

[Gary Childress]

nope.. 100% of my animation is in Bryce.

Well, you do some amazing things in Bryce then.

 

[Wyrmshadow]

Well, you do some amazing things in Bryce then.

I've been using Bryce for 10 years now. Some poeple read a manual, I just start pressing buttons and figure out what happens. It's a lot like playing with LEGO's. You know what you WANT to make, and you know what tools you have at hand. The hard part is figuring out how to make something when the solution is not obvious from your bag of parts/tools.