Guild of Writers

I want to create some power switches like those in Ercana. The ones where the player pushes up to connect the electricity. When the contacts touch there is a shower of sparks. It is the sparks that I’m not sure how to create. I thought I could use a particle emitter but that would squirt out sparks continuously. Can the emitter be activated and deactivated? Or is there another way?

Any thoughts?


Semjay

Semjay wrote:II thought I could use a particle emitter but that would squirt out sparks continuously. Can the emitter be activated and deactivated?

I haven't tried it, but it sounds like you'd want to activate the emitter, which then starts a timed callback which turns it back off again.

If you can't get the control over the 'look' you want using Particles, try experimenting with moire animation.

Make a piece of 2D art showing the thin linear or arced paths you want these sparks to take on a plane, with the lines getting thinner as the sparks would fade: start with white lines on a transparent .png or .tif BG.
Put that on the top layer of a Plasma Standard. For the bottom layer, make another similar piece of art, but with short thin lines perpendicular to the first piece. Animate this layer against the static upper layer using Alpha/Multiply/Alpha layer blending.
When you have something that starts to work, you can refine it further using UV warping, variable transparency and animating brightness and opacity.
Then, once you have one plane of sparks that works for you, duplicate and offset it in space and timing for density and dimensionality.

Thank you. That’s an interesting idea. I’d not thought of using an animated material. However, I’m not very adept at working with materials to that level of sophistication just yet.


Having thought about this a bit more, I suppose I could animate each spark individually (as I’d only need about six of them) and have them move along an arcing path. I could manage that!


Does anyone else have a different idea?

You'll be pleased to know that I have finally got this to work!
Here's the answer:

At the bottom of the Particle System rollout there is a tickable box (that I hadn't noticed) and this brings up the graph editor. Now it is possible to animate it as you would for an object. I animated the Birthrate to be active for 8 frames and this produced a small squirt of sparks.



Place a separate particle emitter at both electrodes and it looks pretty good.

I hope you find this useful!