Particle Emitting Rings

We recently read the incredibly inspiring book Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, which gave us a weird idea/mental image.

Imagine a set of rings alligned like a tube that emitts fiery particles. The location of those rings could be in space and you, the observer, are flying through them. The color of those flaming particles changes over time, such that the particles close to the ring are bright and yellow while the particles that are flying away from the ring appear dark and blue similar to how the bright stars look on the blue background on the flag of the European Union.

In this post we won't go into detail how we think our idea is connected to the book, instead we present our best effort to implement the idea as an animation using Cinema4d. In this version the camera does not fly through the rings. Instead of simply putting the camera on a path through the tube we'll see if we can implement an interactive version in the future.

Here are some of the implementation details: We started by creating a ring object and a point light. From cinema4d's simulation presets we choose a surface emitter and a direction randomizer from the thinking particle subset. We configured the surface emitter to use the ring as its surface and to emit point lights as its particles. The amount and velocity of the particles was adjusted to our liking and we added two key frames to make the particle color fade from yellow to blue. Here is a screenshot showing our implementation. We learned a lot about surface emitters from this tutorial.