I'm looking for a good shader for a rocket trail going from white hot to yellow orange then red and then to a good smoke trail. I've tried gradient in the color channel and a spherical for the blender, a trans. gradient in the tran. channel for the smoke trail falloff and the copied the color to the glow but it really doesn't look good also a blur and aura but I cant get the blur on the particles to look right. The whole shader is not that bad but it still isn't right. Can anybody help!!!

This sort of thing isn't my forte and perhaps somebody else will have some ideas - and a pic of your trail would give us some idea of what you're after... however, this was done using Elevation to control the gradient in the glow channel, applied to a vertex cone with Blur of 5% using Gaussian drop off and High quality; Aura with a Radius of 16. The smoke is a fog box stretched out.

HTH

Mark

that looks GREAT! nice work falcon!

Thanks for the reply!!! This helps! The actual trail of fire and smoke I'm woking with is with the Particle emitter. I'm trying to figure out the settings and a good shader for a trail like behind the space shuttle or a meteor trail. I tried this one but it really sucks. I cant get the settings right (blur,particle setup and shader} Can you help on this? Thanks alot!!!

You can change the size and shape of the particles and shade them in various ways. It's better to do this than rely on blur really (which is difficult to control). Here's a set up which hardly needs any blur. Particle Emitter: Based on Smoke with these alterations: Particle Size: 1.00; Shape: Rectangle; Emit Area: X 0.50, Y 0.50, Z 15.00; Emit Dispersion Angle: 10.00 += 2.00 and no Gravity. Make sure your emitter is selected in the Properties tray then switch to the Texture room and build the shader. You can change the Scale and Intensity sliders in Noise Factory to vary the effect.

Message edited on: 07/08/2004 05:37

Thanks this is just what I was looking for!!!