Need Help: Creating an Animated Bubble Light?

[Guest Messenjah]

Hey everyone,


Recently I've experimented with animated lighting and various other special effects that I can add to Fallout NV for a mod that I'm working on. I managed to get a fully animated building neon sign done by animating by number through NifSkope. So it's time for a new challenge. I would like to make a bubble tube. Something about the height of a normal sized casino room. It has a metal base and a metal top. It would act like a giant glowing bubble light. I would like bubbles to float from the bottom vent up to the top vent at random. The problem is that the only way I can think of to do this other than by-hand would be to have a particle emiitter handle this animation for me. Creating an emitter is easy, however I looked on the Niftools site and noticed that it claims that it doesn't support exporting particles. Is there a way that I can convert a particle emitter animation into a normal animation and then export it? Or is there another way to do this? I know Ghogial "I hope I spelled that right," got an awsome lava lamp in-game. I should be able to get a bubble light in. :P

[TrickyVein]

Yes...I guess you could fudge around with some scrolling textures and/or moving mesh parts (with said scrolling textures applied to them) to achieve a similar effect to a particle system only using a 'static' .nif or at least one with animation (like through using a controller manager/controller sequence). It really depends on what exactly you want to do.

 

It's even possible to animate billboard nodes thus creating what are essentially sprites, which are probably the most cost effective and best-looking way to create bubbles.

[Guest Messenjah]

Interesting proposal. So your saying to make some scrolling textures with alpha channels and then make them effectively into sprites?

 

Could you clarify on how to do this? Will DDS format handle scrolling textures?

[TrickyVein]

everything has to be saved in .dds format regardless of what you're doing, at least to my knowledge - the texture format really doesn't have anything to do with animating textures. .dds allows for an extra alpha channel which is essential in this case.

 

textures can be made to pan using controllers inside of nifkope - I thought this is what you said you had done already when you made your 'fully animated' neon sign?

 

so yeah, if you create billboard nodes which have have flat sheets with your bubble texture applied to them as children of those nodes, you can move these individually via a controller manager.

 

Depending on how many you want to have - how many bubbles you want to have - it may very well be more cost effective and efficient just to set up a particle emitter instead. Probably cheaper, performance-wise too. You'd also have greater control over where the bubbles spawn and be able to throw in random elements like size and rotation for each of the sprites. Here's some great info for particle effects. Otherwise, another possibility is to use a cylinder primitive or many intersecting planes - good examples of this are the 'fxmist' ambient effects - with a bubble texture applied to them which pans upwards. If there are lots and lots of intersecting planes than the illusion may hold, but it still will look very 2D compared to using a particle emitter or using animated billboards.

 

You can, however create some visually very neat looking bubbles if you create a primitive that's warped-looking so that the UV coordinates stretch and compress your bubble texture as it moves across the faces of the mesh.

[weijiesen]

There aer a few ways to do it really.

• Scrolling texture (jukebox does this with the bubbles inside, its a snap really)
  
• Animated (standard) bubble meshes (set the transform over time via Nifskope or Blender)
  
• Animated "GeoMorph" (nonstandard) Mesh. (Geomorph is done via Blender, set via Nifskope)
  
• Particle Emitter (yes, its possible to create entirely in Nifskope... look at EVE mod man :tongue: )
  
• MPS (make a new MPS with bubbles, World orientation, and Z-axis gravity. Then simply place about an Editor mesh!)

baddaboom baddabing

Edited September 22, 2013 by weijiesen