[Brian Jones]

Depending on what look you want and what plugins you have…
-Take all the textures off
-use the Cel Renderer
-use Sketch and Toon
-use LSD (from 3D Attack)
-post process in Photoshop or your favorite video editor
-something else I’m not thinking of 🙂

[Brian Jones]

Add an Emitter
-Emitter Type to Cone
-Sizes to something small (less than 10 probably)
-Angle Horizontal to 90
Now add a rotation object

Are you after that or something different?

[Brian Jones]

Often discussed. A couple of possiblities – Path Deformer, DiSplineDeformer there are other ways. There was SweetSweep but that crashes in 9.5 (and I’m not sure it would do what you wnat – I don’t remember). With the first two, they deform an object along a spline so you would need to grow it out to the length you want then move it along the spline after it is the right length.

[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… 🙂

[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

[Brian Jones]

The simple way-
animate the properties you want in the box that will be emitted, each box’s animation starts a soon as it is born as a particle. Easy and/but all particles behave the same which may or may not be what you want.

or

use the settings in the particle generating node (a PStorm node if you used the ‘TP Basic Emitter’ to start) to change size. Be warned though TP has a LOT of power which means there is almost always more than one way to get what you want and the only way to know what is possible is to have an understanding (at least basic) of all the TP nodes and the XPresso nodes. You can do stuff without knowing much about TP but you can do a lot more if you dig around and practice/play.

[Brian Jones]

There is also DPIT Nature Spirit to look at…

https://www.dpit2.de/

[Brian Jones]

I finally got a chance to look at it. The one text object is easy as it does not move, just create your new one and use the Transfer Function to move it to the same place (or type the numbers in by hand).
For the one that moves – create your new one, transfer it to the old moving one (at frame 0), move it inside the null, then go to the coordinates of the old moving text and right-click on the P.’s and choose Animation/Copy Track then go to to your new text object right click on it’s P coords and choose Animation/Paste Track.

[Brian Jones]

getting a 404 on that link…

[Brian Jones]

Edit/Configure (or Edit/Configure All) of the view window Edit menu – not the main program Edit Menu – or Mode/View Settings in the Attribute Manager window. Click the View tab and the Render Safe, Title Safe and Action safe settings are there…. for the current view if you did Edit/Configure or Mode/View Settings or for all the views if you did Edit/Configure all