Start in photoshop. Paint your clouds in rings. Make sure each ring can be separated but overlaps.
Put the rings on different objects and rotate them correctly. If this is done right, you will have a cheap but very good looking effect.

If this were animated you would see what I'm talking about, by the exit button.
[Link to www.freewebs.com]

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i'm not sure what you mean about painting the clouds in rings and stuff and that what different objects should there be? could you create a rough example for me? (photoshop texture and model)

this is what i've been able to do so far:
(not very good)

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Dave

"I came! I slept! I went home!"

I think that looks pretty good, it looks space time warpy.
Here's what I got with particles bound to a vortex space warp along with some geometry with an opacity map.

I don't know how this would translate into a game mod, cause I know nothing about that sort of stuff.
I can elaborate on how to do this if you think it might work.

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Chris

if you could show me how to do that, i'd be grateful.

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Dave

"I came! I slept! I went home!"

Wish i could but i don't do 3d anymore.

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what caused you to stop?

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Dave

"I came! I slept! I went home!"

i was just informed that particle systems don't work with the game's engine, is there any other way you can think of that might work?

p.s. if you elaborate on the particle systems way to do it, i'll try it just for the heck of it because it's cool.

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Dave

"I came! I slept! I went home!"

I haven't forgot, just been kind of busy. I want to make a tut for the tutorial section, and add some stuff so more people might get something out of it.

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Chris

Whats the engine? You might have particles in the game engine itself. chances are if this effect is going to be used in a game you will need to use the game engines tools to achieve the bulk of the effect.

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i don't know what the engine is. i believe that stardock created it for their games specifically, but i'm not certain. I was told by the guy who made all of the fx for the game that particle systems don't work.

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Dave

"I came! I slept! I went home!"

yeah, that makes it pretty tricky. I know if I was to try and do this in unreal I would model a few elements in max and set up mapping coordinates etc.. and then do most of the effect with the unreal editor. animate noise clouds on say a cone primitive using unreal's material editor. I'd say that most engines are going to need pretty specific stuff for things to work and look right. something like this isnt as straight forward as say a statue or a house model because you have to have animated swirling textures etc.. you would probably need to set up that type of thing within the tools for that engine. I may be wrong though. If its just a max effect the process is going to be totally different, you can animate procedural maps and use spacewarps and particles all you want but none of those things will work inside a game engine.

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