Creating Halos

[Rhee]

Okay guys! Suppose I have a lamp or something and I want to create that soft aura or halo of shinyness around it (like the lamps along the water's edge at Ferry Terminal, or the yellow ones going up the Great Stair). What is the best way to do this, for uru's purposes? The light won't actually be affecting the avatar so I thought maybe a couple of planes set at perpendicular angles with transparent textures would work, but maybe there is a better way?

Working in Blender 2.61 with PyPRP2. thanks

[Christopher]

I don't know how to do it in PyPRP (and I don't know if PyPRP2 even support it) but in theory you can make a plane, which is always turned to your avatar. So if you are movving the plane is moving with you. That's how the halos in the city are made. But Ican't help you with this in Blender

Christopher

[Calena]

The standard method for light 'halos' is the use of sprites or billboards: How To

Your real problem is that as long as you're still working with Blender 2.5+ and pyPRP2, you can't really do anything. If you're ready to dig deeper and learn more, you could keep modeling in the newer versions of Blender, then export as objects and finish building the age in Blender 2.49b.

I'd venture to guess though that you've learned enough modeling in 2.6+ that the transition to 2.49b might be much easier than you think. I pop around in Blender, Max, Maya, SoftImage, Mudbox, Bryce, etc. without much difficulty because I already know the features; all I have to find are the buttons. I also discovered that having already learned Alscript, Cyan's plugin was a breeze.

There is though the initial frustration of, "Dang it! I already know how to do this. Where's the stupid button?!!"

[Rhee]

Thanks for the quick replies, guys.

I don't know how to do it in PyPRP (and I don't know if PyPRP2 even support it) but in theory you can make a plane, which is always turned to your avatar. So if you are movving the plane is moving with you. That's how the halos in the city are made. But Ican't help you with this in Blender

Christopher

As for this, with the rotating plane, I recall dendwaler doing something like this in his Cathedral age thread, so it must be possible in PyPRP1 at least! However, the lights I want to make are quite distant from where the avatar would be so there's basically no parallax and therefore any rotation should be redundant, so I don't know if it would be necessary for my application or not. Anyway, thanks for the explanation!

The standard method for light 'halos' is the use of sprites or billboards: How To

Your real problem is that as long as you're still working with Blender 2.5+ and pyPRP2, you can't really do anything. If you're ready to dig deeper and learn more, you could keep modeling in the newer versions of Blender, then export as objects and finish building the age in Blender 2.49b.

I'd venture to guess though that you've learned enough modeling in 2.6+ that the transition to 2.49b might be much easier than you think. I pop around in Blender, Max, Maya, SoftImage, Mudbox, Bryce, etc. without much difficulty because I already know the features; all I have to find are the buttons. I also discovered that having already learned Alscript, Cyan's plugin was a breeze.

There is though the initial frustration of, "Dang it! I already know how to do this. Where's the stupid button?!!"

Yeah, i'm seeing more and more i'll have to just bite that particular bullet and start using both exporters (if I want to publish this age, anyway haha!) I was hoping that pyPRP2 would export these halo-ish things just as a texture because I have been managing to get most of the other textures to export fine, just haven't succeeded with a transparent one yet (only been trying since this morning! ). Thanks for the link on the How To, and i'll see where things go from there!

[Deledrius]

I started to add support for the ViewFaceModifier to PyPRP2 but I'm not sure it was ever finished/merged. Either way, especially for something distant, just make it a textured plane centered on (or sometimes just in front of) the object. You can always add the proper modifier to make it swivel later.