EffectsBlender Question - Starship interaction with Nebula Gases

Kirtemor

I want to do an animation where my ship passes through a nebula. I want it to interact with any gases it passes through. Like when a plane passes through a could. Can anyone point me in the right direction of a good tutorial or advice? Any and all would be appreciated. Working in cycles.

count23

You wont find anything specifically for nebulas, but plane/object flying through clouds should get you general tutorials, like this one here:

There's generally two schools of thought how to pull it off, and it depends exactly how much resourcing you have at your hand.

Number one is to build your volumetric clouds and then have your ship fly thorugh it using simple physics to push the volumetric elements out of the way.

Number two is something similar to how IRML did his Voyager intro nebula flythrough. Rather than produce a nebula object itself and try to trick the fluid sim to work teh way you want, create image planes of your nebula in layers you layer over and under the object at a medium to far distance, and then you create a particle emitters on the surfaces of your object where it's meant to intersect and fake moving through the nebula by having particles emit from the bow of your ship/plane as if it was the ship distrurbing the gasses as it flies through.

Hopefully that helps.

Kirtemor

Thanks Count, Its a place to start.