[lennyjames]

Hello there,
I'm fairly new to LW. I've created OK looking space animation scene with ships streaking through a planet's atmosphere. I'm looking for a way to place heat haze emitting from the craft's engines. Any suggestions? thanks!

[Mark]

Try this:

Create a long, narrow cylinder and parent it to the exhaust.

Apply a nearly transparent fractal texture (try Turbulence or Fractal Noise), stretched along the length and then animate the texture position.

In the transparency channel, you'll also want a gradient applied that makes the cylinder entirely transparent before it's end.

You'll probably want to apply a little refraction as well (and ensure you have ray trace refraction switched on in your scene).


This should be enough to get you going. Give it a try - tweak it - and post some renders for us.

[lennyjames]

Thanks for the tip Mark!

Everything seems to be coming into order, now all i've got to do is tweak it a little. Though, the refraction channel of the cylinder exhaust does not seem to animate. Should I copy the fractal layer and paste it into the refraction channel? Currently I'm just seeing a static refration channel while the rest are animating (almost) correctly..

[Mark]

Well, I've conducted a little test, and the refraction map should be animatable.

The link is to a quick test AVI I made to check this out. The sphere is a 100% transparent sphere with a 1.2 refraction index. Over this was layered a default grid procedural texture.

In order to animate the texture, I simply added an envelope to the Rotation/Heading channel in the actual texture properties panel.

Hope this helps...

AVI: http://www.medwards.dsl.pipex.com/lightwave/test.avi

I suspect that if you're trying to get the same in your refraction channel as in one of your other texture channels, then yes, you'll need to duplicate the layer (simply use a copy/paste) function here to move all the settings.