Firing a phaser (short animation)

100% low poly, made and rendered in Eevee (Blender) (with viewport render).

 

Firing a phaser is fairly easy to make: set up a bezier curve, apply a physical constraint to a cylinder to follow the curve, and insert the necessary keyframes in the timeline.

 

For the "world" shader I used a star map from NASA (credits: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Constellation figures based on those developed for the IAU by Alan MacRobert of Sky and Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott and Rick Fienberg)).)

 

Can you spot the Big Dipper?

 

It took me a while to figure out how to set this up. In the world sharder editor: use a texture coordinate - mapping - environment texture. Connect the "camera" of the texture coordinate to the vector of the mapping node and in the scale options of the mapping node, set X and Y to 3 (leave Z at 1).

 

Connect the "color out" of the environment texture to a "RGB to BW" node, and feed this into a RGB curve node. Then drag this curve down to get rid of all the noise.

 

Connect the output of the RGB curve node to the color of the background node and connect the latter to the surface of the world output, as usual.

 

 

 

Done