NewTek Europe - Tutorials

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Creating a glowing energy over an object

Step 6. Finishing touches

We're almost finished. Now the energy should be animated. The animation for all three channels (Color, Luminosity and Transparency) should be the same (note that only Position Z and Rotation H are animated).

You may wonder why we need the third layer ("Transparency") in LowCountFighterv2 object? Well, it will be used in Surface Mixer shader and will help us to have the energy appear (after the laser hit the fighter) and then disappear in few seconds.

The idea is simple. We need to have the energy change its opacity from 100% (the moment of the hit) to 0% and it would be cool if we could make it disappear unevenly. That's why we will need another procedural texture and we will use it as an alpha channel for the Energy surface.

Go to the Shaders tab in the Surface Editor and add SurfMixer. Select Blend Surface from the list (it should be the name you gave to "Transparency" layer). Set the Blend Opacity to 0%.

We will animate the opacity using Dented procedural texture with animated Scale parameter (this way we can control the moment of appearing of the energy and the way it disappears). Here are the settings of SurfMixer opacity:

and the animation of the Scale parameter

The energy appears at frame 49 because this is the first frame when the particles reach the collision (or, if you prefer, when the laser hits the fighter). It disappears at frame 170 because I think that's cool. :-)

Well, that's it. If you wish, you can play with parameters of the textures and achieve even better results. This technique can be greatly improved if you use more sophisticated textures in SurfMixer opacity channel. For example, if you want to have a man hit by evil alien's plasma gun, you can animate the energy to spread from the hit point over the whole body and then disappear, remaining for a few seconds only on man's fingertips. Think for a second about things like gradients, weight maps and UV projections... See? You got the idea.

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