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Date: Mon, 24 May 93 18:23:45 EDT
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From: Mark Thompson <rutgers!westford.ccur.com!mark>
To: bobsbox.rent.com!lightwave
Cc: "Scott Jones (Dr. Jones)" <plains.nodak.edu!jones>
Subject: Re: Rocket Flames & Star lights?

>     2:  What are the proper settings for the 'point' light to make a star,
>     and or a light (like in the Creature pict Mark?)  Havent had a lot
>     of success with this one... :(

That would depend on whether or not you were using LW3 or not. If you are,
then you simply enable lens flare for that light source and select the
appropriate options (excuse me but I forget the exact terminology used):
Star - star streaks and possibly glow
Light (as in Creature pic) - glow and random streaks

>     1:  How do you make a rocket's flames.  (I remember someone explaining
>     how to do this but cant find the letter.)

Rather than summarize, here is the text from my 1991 Amazing Computing article
which talked about this kind of stuff (this was for LW1):

Rocket Blasts

A possibly less obvious use for transparency mapping is for varying an
object's apparent density.  For example, a simulated rocket blast might be
fully opaque at the end of the exhaust but gradually become totally
transparent at the bottom of the blast.  There are several ways to achieve
this including an image map and using Texture Falloff.  This effect works
well when viewed from the proper angle but when the view shifts toward the
fully transparent end, the object will appear to disappear if it is made up
of 1 sided polygons.  Back face culling will remove the more opaque
polygons from the other side of the blast leaving only the transparent ones
at the bottom, which of course are invisible so the object disappears.  The
obvious solution is to use 2 sided polygons which is generally a good idea
for most transparent objects. This will not be necessary in the next release
because a two-sided polygon toggle flag has been added in LightWave which
will both reduce memory consumed by two-sided polygons and remove this burden
from the modeler. Three uses of transparency can be seen in figure 4.

Noisy Surfaces

Another feature unique to LightWave is the fractal noise texture and it is
perhaps one of my favorite.  It can produce a pseudo-random modulation of
color, diffuse lighting, specular lighting, transparency, reflection
mapping, and bump mapping.  The manual mentions using it for things like
rust, dirt, or natural looking simulated terrain, but these are just the
tip of the iceberg.  Some of the things I have used it for include flames,
smoke, clouds, patchy fog, and comet trails as well as simpler surfaces
like carpeting, stucco, or stone.  What really makes fractal noise so much
more powerful than an image map however is the ability to give it a 3D
velocity vector that will not repeat on itself.  You could for example
apply an image map to a surface that when given a velocity, looked like a
flickering flame.  However, the flicker pattern will repeat as soon as the
image map has moved a distance equal to its size (depending on the
velocity), creating a monotonous and mechanical look.  Fractal noise on the
other hand is a procedural texture and will not repeat.

One example of animated fractal noise is some dark sooty smoke I did for an
industrial cityscape.  To create the object, I stretched and manipulated a
sphere until it looked like a somewhat fat and irregular upside down tear
drop.  It was then given fractal noise color and transparency as well as
clear Edge Opacity.  The colors assigned were two dark shades of gray and a
Y velocity of a few feet/second made the smoke appear to rise.  Smaller X
and Z velocities were added (about 1/10th that of Y) to give it a little
variation.  Similar, but not identical, velocities were assigned to the
transparency which ranged in value from about 0% to 75%.  These settings
produced a very convincing smoke effect (see figure 5).  Combining a
luminous orange fractal noise tear drop with with the glow effects
mentioned above makes a nice candle flame.
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