iceball heats up and forms a comet tail...

A friend of mine asked me to do a shot of a comet changing from a block of ice into a comet as it heats up and sheds a brilliant tail.

Any ideas how to go about doing this?

I use LW 5.6. I have 6.5 but I know my way around that about as well as I know my way around Max... damned Newtek.

Cu

Rob

[Commodore-SirJohn]

This wouldn't happen to be for "Snowball's Chance" would it?

Anyway, there is a way to give 6.5 the look of 5.6, though not everything will be under the same tab as it was in 5.6

In modeller, under Preferences (at the top of the menu), there's a selection marked "edit menu layout". At the bottom of the window that pops up, there'd a button marked "6.0 style" Clicking on that gives you everything you had in 5.6, though as I said above, a little bit re-arranged (like the "statistics" command and its companions are now under the tools tab instead of display).

Hope this helped.

The comet's tail is easy. In 6.5, just create either a HV Emitter or Partigon Emitter (depending on what effect you are after), parent it to the comet object, and adjust the particle emitter's flow envelope so that the particles begin to emit slowly, and speeding up as the Comet object moves.
You can then either play with the particle surface in the Settings menu, or you can add HyperVoxels if you wish.

Erm, John, I couldn't find anything of the sort in modeller. And why would I be looking in modeller anyway? I'm trying to use Layout...

As for hypervoxels and the emitter, I understand the concepts fine, I just have no clue where to begin button pushing. *lol* I feel like a complete newbie again with this thing.

Cu

Rob

Figuring the preferences I needed were really in Layout and not in Modeller, I found the 5.6 mode. I'll play with it some more and hopefully pick up a video or something on how to use this monster. Any reccomendations?

*you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming into LW 7* hehe

Cu

Rob

[Commodore-SirJohn]

Oh, okay... I thought you were going to build an object with the effect...

Personally, I found that Layout's 5.6 mode is a bit too limited. I've gotten used to the 6.5 layout, so all I can really say is play with it. You'll get used to it with time. :-)