* Subject: Lock & Melt. * Date: Sunday, 08 January 1995 09:25:02 [58] * From: Shane Davison <daviso@cs.uregina.ca>How to create a simple yet effective warp-drive (a la Star Wars/Trek):
- quickrender an Imagine starfield
- save it and map the image onto a plane
(make sure you create a state and lock it)
- set-up the camera to look directly at the entire plane
- create an appropriate-length animation in which the
plane scales to about 10 times its current size
- here's the key: starting with frame 2, use the previously
rendered frame as the backdrop image for each successive frame
- once you've rendered the animation, you can use it as a
backdrop for star fly-throughs or map it onto a plane for
cool special effects
The great thing about doing it this way is that you can easily achieve different
but equally nice effects by changing the position of the camera, the length of
the animation, the scaling amount, etc. and re-render. Also, other cool effects
can be accomplished with clever uses of other parameters such as using the image
as a transparency map on a plane with randomly colored faces for a colorful
explosion effect.
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