FIREFLIES and how to make them?

[alex26i]

I wanted to use the particail tool and put particails in the scene then give them a turbulance..... But I don't know how to turn off and on the glow. I had figured the opacity map would work.. off and on.

Can someone help... Or have a better Idea.

Would it be better if I put a instance of a firefly wireframe.. with a animated texture..

[jtk77]

well...if a shader glow isn;t working for you with the particles avalable to software render..
you COULd ..this is jsut a 2am idea..
Do a particle instance(replace) with some sphere geomtry and make a glowing shader for it and a bit of transparency.
that would probably work..take a particle grid..add some turbulance, set the inital state ..then put a slight newton on it so they want to go in and out of the center with some turbulance.
Try it out , see if it works.

[thedunadan]

There are quite a few ways to to the turn on and off thing You could simply keyframe it the shader values. For a some slight randomness it might help to do the following:

lambert1.glowIntensity = b - (a * noise(time));

with b being the aimed intensity and a the ammount of randomness, like

lambert1.glowIntensity = .8 - (.2 *noise(time));

it will give values between .6 and .8

if (time > 10)
lambert1.glowIntensity = 0;
else
lambert1.glowIntensity = .8 - (.2 *noise(time));

This expression will have the glow expression working until time = 10 has been reached... afterwards the glow value will go down to 0. If this kind of aproach seems to your liking have a look at the expresions chapter of the maya help.

[alex26i]

Making the particials float around has not been a problem. The control of the Glow of the fireflies has been.. I wanted the glow to fade in then out smoothly. And to be Randomly on and off of the glow.

[alex26i]

Thanyou Dunadan.. Your imput is very usefull.. I don't think I have to do it this complex. But using your expression I can add the GLOW fade to make it look really good..

so far.. I have
RUNTIME

int $everythree;
if ($everythree>=10)
{
$everythree=0;
if (rand(100)<=97) particleShape1.opacityPP=0;
else particleShape1.opacityPP= rand( 2 * time);
}
else
{
$everythree++;
}

But of course this isn't very natural looking, would be great for city lights..

[thedunadan]

Feel free to mail me to webmaster@thedunadan.com ... i might be able to help u a bit more on the expression