Plug-ins Key to Expanding Universe
3D animation is a fast-changing world, where job requirements morph as fast as the latest effects become recognizable and, therefore, obsolete. It’s virtually impossible for a company focused on refining its own software to deploy new effects as fast as the demand arises. Even simple “effects,” like procedural shaders to create various types of surfaces, are simply too varied to be part of the standard out-of-the-box software. Dozens of plug-ins are available for Electric Image, but here are a few choice offerings for a few choice plug-in developers.
Northern Lights Productions
Blair Burtan of Northern Lights Productions has been a primary resource of Electric Image effects for as long as the software has supported plug-ins. He is the original author of UberShape — Universe’s built-in primitives maker — among other things. Northern Lights Productions offers numerous compelling plug-ins.
- Psunami This $499 port of Arete’s Psunami is a water environment shader that is a direct descendent of the software used to render the ocean in Titanic. The plug-in comes in several parts. First, a geometry component generates water and waves according to a wide variety of inputs and options for wave height, frequency, wind speed, and more. Not only does the resulting water surface deform realistically, but it can be used to animate effectors attached to a model, to make your boat bob in the water, for instance. A water world dome that covers your project adds realistic over-water atmospherics. Finally, a set of water shaders allow you to apply a variety of watery color and surface effects to your scene. Psunami may be somewhat specialized, but it’s unbeatable for creating watery worlds.
- Dante Probably the best of the smoke and fire plug-ins for Universe, Dante ($299) offers control over the most obscure effects, such as particle cohesion and collision events and inter-frame emissions. Although realistic smoke and fire takes work to set up, this plug-in offers all the control you need to create realistic pyrotechnics.
- Blaster Blaster is, well, not a blast to use. You must pre-slice-and-dice your models into lots of pieces, then texture-map the resulting jigsaw puzzle in a sensible way. You see Blaster ($399) doesn’t actually explode objects; it merely propels them as if hurled by exploding bombs, complete with shock waves, drag, compression, collision detection, and gravity. If you want to blow up a building into ten thousand pieces, then the building has to be prefabricated as a collection of ten thousand discreet parts. But if you must blow something up, Blaster is the master.
TripleDTools
TripleDTools has created a variety of excellent shaders in response to its own in-house production requirements. One of these is PowerParticles Pro, a basic version of which is available for free download. But the company’s most compelling offering is its library of reactive shaders. These perform highly customizable functions, and can do so in reaction to existing surfaces. For example, you can use its aFraktal to apply fractal bumps only to dark areas of an underlying texture map.
- MondoBlocks This $139 shader is like Legos for building shaders of your own. It provides an interface to many of the controls used by creators of custom shaders, thus making it possible to create custom shader effects without programming through Electric Image’s API. You won’t use MondoBlocks to quickly texture a surface, as, say, rusty chrome, but since it is reactive to underlying textures or can be used as a base layer for other reactive shaders, it is a great tool for creating finely tuned customized surfaces.
- aFraktal One great feature of this $239 shader is the sensitivity to camera angle and slope, meaning the effects of the shader can realistically produce the snow-covered peaks of mountains or the faces of jagged cliffs. Billed as an “integrated shading network,” aFraktal brings the world of fractals to your electric image surfaces, with sensitivity to existing textures, but it also allows you to manipulate various rendering channels, such as specularity and transparency, from a single location. This is a fabulous tool for creating richly textured surfaces such as clouds, rocks, or fire with a minimum of effort.
- aEdge One of my favorite shader sets, this one is simple in practice but produces wonderful lighting effects, such as colored rim lights and even electron microscope-style renderings. The real beauty of this $159 shader set for lighting effects is its tiny impact on rendering speed compared to actual light sources, along with its ease of use. By layering this shader onto existing surfaces, you can simulate the effect of backlighting an object with brightly colored lights, or use the results as a basis for mapping corrosion to the edges and of surfaces.
Konkeptoine
Konkeptoine‘s shaders all come on a single low-cost disk, though more volumes are planned. These are some of my favorite shaders, and especially for one price of $95, they’re hard to beat.
- FractalFoam This shader defaults to looking like a thousand eyes of newt on a bed of blackberry gelatin — which is to say, not much of anything you’d actually want to use — but it’s readily modified to resemble stucco, blown styrene, or cell cultures in a petri dish. Like all Konkeptoine shaders, these are reactive, so you can control them with the results of other shaders or texture maps. These are great if you want to write your name with foaming acid.DirtLayer As its name implies, this shader applies a film of grunge on a surface. This makes a great base layer for other reactive shaders, since it applies a noisy pattern that makes surfaces look more organic and real.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on August 14, 2001
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