plasma ball

[Brian Jones]

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]

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

Noah

[Brian Jones]

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]

Cool- I’m going to try it. 🙂

-Noah

[Donal Hanafin]

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