Akira Motorcycle Trails

[tribesman]

I'm looking to recreate the effect of the motorcyle trails from the anime movie akira. So far I've tried using objects with glow intensites and also emitting particles along a path with a 'die on exit' attribute so that they disappear after a certain length. Neither of these have produced desirable results. I believe that the best direction may be going with the glow intensity of an object, but I'm running into the problem of the glow extend too far into space - rather than staying localized on the surface of the object. I'm trying to map certain attributes of a blinn to eliminate the problem of a large glowing radius - but I don't know of the right utilities/attributes to link up. Any help creating this effect is much appreciated.

-mike R

[ame]

You might want to look at PaintFX glow, you can convert a path in a brush stroke and animate the stroke to follow your object.

Should be quite streight forward to set up. just a suggestion.

Later.

-a

[jtk77]

why not render the lights or glow serperated from you main piece then do the effect in post?
you can offset/repeat just the light layers so they ghost out and that might do exactly what you need without effecting the main footage.

[mantrid]

I do think its easiest and cleanest to do this in post by rendering the trail seperately and animating a mask in post. However As mentioned above, paint effects will do it just dandy, also, what can can be very effective for such effects is to use a boolean operation with shaders. This is quite straight forward option in renderman, not so simple with Maya shaders, but very very effective. You basically animate a texture map (black n white) and apply each shader to a colour, and use the boolean function. So you can effectively draw the streaks for the wheel on the ground in render-time.

~Pootang~

[joojaa]

Actually boolen ops with shaders is easy in maya too just take the ouput of your shader and input it to any node (with color blender being moste usefull of them all but somtimes even +- avarage and multiplydivide are usefull and yes even the choise node is fine) you need and then connect it to a surface shader and assign that tho whatever you like.