Introduction
Raising shields is a very important thing when animating battle scenes, the shields must be effected when fired upon by phasers, the shields may not be necessary, but they do add a great effect and make your animations look more detailed. This tutorial has been adapted from a tutorial from the Blender Park site. The original tutorial shows how to make a force field that lights up when it's touched, they same technique can be applied for phasers and photon torpedoes.
 |
Setting up the shields
First, choose what model you want to use, here we will use the Jem' Hadar model, because it's simple and will render quickly, you can use any model you want. Click here to download the Jem' Hadar model (256 KB). Add some normal lights around the model so it can be seen, make sure you set the 'layer' option on each light. Now add a sphere and resize it to roughly fit the shape of the model, move it to layer 2, then add a new material to the shield, make it blue and turn on the ZTransp value and set the Alpha value to about half and the Add value to full. Add a marble texture with the turbulence value set to 30, in the Material Buttons, turn off the Col value and set it to Alpha. Go to the Display Buttons and turn on Unified Render. If you render the scene, now, you should see the ship and some black marks all over it, to get rid of this, turn down the contrast value to 0.400 in the Texture Buttons.
|
 |
Fire phasers
To show how the shields can be used for still images or animations, we'll set up a phaser beam which has already been fired on the ship. Insert a plane and delete three vertices, select the remaining one and while holding down the control key, left click somewhere away from the ship. Now you should have a line, move one vertice to be somewhere just touching the shields and the other one away from the ship (off camera). Select both vertices and subdivide five or more times until you get a busy looking line, add a new material to it with the Halo value on first, then set the Alpha down to 0.3, the Hard and Add to full, make it Red.
 |
Shield fluctuation
That's the beam, now add a lamp in layer 2, place it where the beam meets the shields, turn on the Layer and Sphere values, set the Dist value to 3 or 4 and the Energy value to 4 or 5. If you wish to add an effect that makes the shields emit light, then duplicate the lamp (leave it where it is) and move it to layer 1, change the Energy value back to 1. If you render the scene with both layers on, you should see a simple looking effect, but from research and watching tons of Star Trek episodes, we find that this effect goes all over the shields, not just on a small part of the shields. Add a lamp in layer 2 with the layer value on, turn on the Sphere value and set the Dist value to 10 and the Energy to 2 or 3, make sure the lamp is in the centre of the ship (if you didn't move the ship or the cursor, then it should already be there). Render it now and looks great.
Shield function
The way the shields have been set up now makes it easy for animation, all you need to do is animate the lamp that is touching the shields, when it touches the shields and when it doesn't. The object or weapon that is touching the shields should be the child of the lamp (select the object, then the lamp and press CTRL+P), when you animate the object, the lamp will be animated, too. If you wish to use phasers, then animate the lamp to touch the shields as the beam hits, then to go away when the beam stops. Alternatively, you could just animate the energy value using key framing (or I > Energy), you must also animate the beam, in the Material Buttons, use key framing for either the size value (I > HaSize) or alpha value (I > Alpha).
 |
Custom options and tips
The lamp that was duplicated and moved to layer 1 is optional, it is good for making the animation or image look more detailed. For the marble texture, you could try some other textures that you did yourself, for example. In the shields material, animate the Ofs values using key framing (I > Ofs), that will make the shields look like they're flowing or make them look more electrical, it's best used for brig and emergency force fields (inside the ships) in animations. If the ship is animated, then parent the shields to the ship. To make the animation look more accurate, when using photon torpedoes, don't make them ricochet off the shields, they should be absorbed, for example.