Motion Blur in space

Hey Guys.

I'm trying to animate a space chase in MAX7. I've got KY Milky Way plugin, generating my stars. I would like there to be a motion blur, independant of the camera, so that there's an illusion of the ships moving without any actual movement. At the moment, motion blur only activates when I move the camera, which is not what I want.

KY Milky way has a Hyperspace effect generator that does exactly what I want (stars blurred) but unfortunately, it does not seem to want to animate it. (ie. it's only a static image)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

Does it generate an actual object or just an image? If it is any sort of actual object you should be able to blur it independently from the camera. Look in the help files for "object blur" and you should get the effect you want.

Good luck!

 

I think I need to rephrase my question. How can I do this from scratch? KY-Milky Way is a great plugin for static images of hyperspace, but it doesn't seem like it's suited for animation. If you know of a way I can generate a starfield that I can use for a motion blur effect (independant of the camera being viewed, please let me know.

Unfortunately KY)_Milky has turned out to be a russian plugin and their forums and help files are inaccessible to me, so looks liek I have to start afresh.

I'm in a tricky situation because I need to have finished this by the end of the week. So, if you can lend a helping hand, that'd be great

Cheers.

 

Have you tried using one of the great starfield backgrounds available on SciFi-3D? You can map those to a geosphere (2-sided material) and do whatever you like to them in Max...just a suggestion.

 

I just DL'd the plugin and tried it on MAX 5 and it does motion blurs just fine... check your fading values, if the blur fading is too high the stars will practically disappear...

Darksteps...

 

That works too.

 

Darksteps, can you walk me through getting motion blur? I can get the hyperspace look for a static image but not animation.

Myself, I can get motion blur, but only one that is dependant on the movement of the camera. Which is not what I want. I want stars to be blured with respects to the ships (ie. stars moving by the ships really fast) as opposed to the camera, which will be moving around in the scene.

Thanks

 

ok, I obviously misunderstood what you were asking... I think I have it now...

are you wanting the stars(or debris) to literally be moving in between the ships, kinda like a Star Trek warp effect...?

if so, you can do that with a particle system... and I can explain it if that's what you're looking for...

if not, then I'm still confused...

Darksteps...

 

Urm. Let's see if I can better express that.

I have 1 ship being chased by 3 others. The camera is mounted on top of one of the ships. I want the stars in the scenery to zoom by giving the illusion that the ships are moving, even though they really are just sitting still. Then, I want the camera to lift off the top of one of the ships and focus on another one.

As of now, the motion blur screws up at this point, since the blur is dependant on the camera, as the camera moves, the blur gets reversed. I don't want that to happen.

 

Sounds like you need to physically move the stars or move through a field of real ones. There's an asteroid script for max that you might be able to use to generate star-looking objects. That adds a lot of time to your renders however and can bog down your previews. If you want to give the script a go let me know and I'll post it.

Hope that helps.

 

Sweet. Let's have a look then.

the whole sequence will be less than 20 seconds long. Hopefully I'll be able to do it. As long as it's possible, I've got no complaints.

The thing is, with KY-Milky, there's a feature called Hyperspace, which gives me EXACTLY what I want, as long as it's a static image, if anyone knows how to animate it, my life would get a whole lot easier.

 

In the morning I'll be at my PC so I can send you that Maxscript. Could you post an image of what you have so far sometime? That'd help a lot to know what you are trying to do.

Later.

 

http://www.geeknewz.com/imagedb/albums/userpics/10004/Scene.jpg

I want this to be animated, so the stars zoom by in the same direction, independant of how the camera is moving.

 

Hmm, well one thing you might try to to generate a HUGE image with your milky-way program and map it to the inside of a hollow cylinder. That way it would be like flying in a tunnel...and all you'd have to move was the cylinder.

Here's the script for making asteroids as well. (Right-Click and Save-As)
I'm assuming you know how to execute Maxscripts and the dialog box that pops up is pretty straightforward. Hope that helps!

 

ok, I think I've found the answer... there's a company called Bytegeist Software and they have a plugin called Ghost Trails which it looks like you can apply to a particle system... this will give the illusion of a motion blur but without the motion blur technique...

they have a demo version of the software up to MAX 6, dunno if you can use a 6 plugin on 7... even tho you can use v4 plugs on v5...

but here's the demo link:

Ghost Trails Demo

Darksteps...

 

thanks darksteps. I'll definately try this.

DVeditor, I'll try out your suggestion as well. I hope at least one of them work.

EDIT: I've used the Ghostrails plug in and it's very useful. Only problem being that without registeration, the particle flow system is limited to 50 frames. You think I could do it without using that feature of the plugin?

 

If you could cut back and forth between your shots fast enough maybe...but 50 frames is pretty short. Might just need to play with it and see what happens. Good luck!

 

I'll see if I can find a shareware version... seems like someone else did a similar plugin, but you don't have to register it... I'll do some digging...

Darksteps...

EDIT: ok, here's a plugin made by the guy that did Milky Way... the site claims it's based on the Ghost Trails plugin, so maybe this will be good enough... I don't have MAX 6 or 7 so I can't test it out... here's the link:

Trails

and here's a nice place to go for freeware or charityware plugins:

Maxplugins.de

 

Darksteps, you are awesome.

I remember you mentioned something about particles flowing between the ships (startrek)

How would one go about doing an effect like that? I think that might be more realisitc than stars zooming by.

 

well what you can do is create a plane some distance in front of the ships, then open up the properties and make it unrenderable, so it won't show up in the render...

then go to the particles dialogue and use PARRAY and choose the plane as the emitter... if the particles are heading the opposite then go to the MODIFY panel and apply a NORMALS modifer and flip the normals...

you may need to increase or decrease the speed and depending on how big the plane is maybe even the particle numbers... if you want them to swirl kind of like a vortex or a whirpool, then just key a circular rotation to the plane, but only rotate of the axis perpendicular to the direction of the particles...

now just apply that KY-Trails effect to the particles and make the adjustments on it(I DL'd the MAX 6 demo last night and played with it a bit, that's a really nice Trail plugin)...

but that should help ya out a bit... PM me if you have any Q's...

Darksteps...