• Maxon Cinema 4D

  plasma ball

  Posted by Donal Hanafin on January 18, 2006 at 6:39 pm

  Hello all,
  I was hoping somebody might have some ideas on how to model a plasma ball a’la

  https://van.hep.uiuc.edu/van/demos/Plasma%20Ball/Plasma%20Ball.htm

  I’ve a logo created in cinema 4d and I’d like to have some sort of lighting effect that would simulate the same effect of electricity/plasma stuff captured in a sphere. It wouldn’t need to be animated for the time. I have ideas of animating at some point in the future but for the moment just an image is all I need. I was thinking something along the lines of a pyrocluster or maybe using the storm manager plug in. Is this a good place to start?

  Thanks a mil
  Donal

  Donal Hanafin replied 20 years, 7 months ago 3 Members · 5 Replies
• 5 Replies

• 

  Brian Jones

  January 18, 2006 at 11:46 pm

  Here is an attempt with an extruded sphere and a few glow materials. It’s not all the way there but it’s promising as a start.

  https://members.shaw.ca/bdjones/plasmaBall.zip
• 

  Noah Kadner

  January 19, 2006 at 12:22 am

  Wow Brian- that’s awesome. Can you describe a bit how you made it?

  Noah
• 

  Brian Jones

  January 19, 2006 at 2:32 am

  Sphere – icosahedron – 10 segments (or whatever depending on how many arms you want)
  -make it editable
  -select all polys
  -Matrix Extrude tool
  -8 steps (or whatever)
  -move 50 (whatever is good)
  -I left scale at 80/80/80
  -small rotate on x,y,z (I did 10)
  -Variation/Per Step
  -Move min and max at 100 (so it stays spherical)
  -Scale min/max to taste (even weird values)
  -Rotation min/max – positive and negative (I did -100/+100)
  -after the extrude the tips of each ‘arm’ will still be selected, Set the selection for later.
  -select all and scale polys along their normals to make the arms very thin (the glow from the textures will make most of the thickness)
  -add and and scale a second sphere to be the internal ball

  after that it is just adding the textures and getting them to have the right glow in the right places. It’s not too bad for a still but AR would be way better for animation and *especially* since AR glow can be seen through transparency so you could put a sphere around it, like there should be, and still have the glow show up. It’s been a while since I played with AR glow though and my first quick tests did not go well. More practice… 🙂
• 

  Noah Kadner

  January 19, 2006 at 4:31 am

  Cool- I’m going to try it. 🙂

  -Noah
• 

  Donal Hanafin

  January 19, 2006 at 10:10 am

  Hi Brian,
  That’s brilliant thanks for that, I’d have been flapping around with that for god knows how long. I’ll have a play around with it and see what I can come up with.

  Donal

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