heh...what are hypervoxels...there is a book waiting to be written...
I could write for days on what it is, how to use em for different things, and styles and techniques to accomplish the exact look you want...
Basically, hypervoxels allow you to add true 3-d space to a point. the space will accept shadows, become translucent, solid, transparent, animated...etc etc etc upon your demand...(And settings)
some common uses for them are using an emitter and collision setup to emit particles from something, (In this case the engines) set to certain speeds and dispersions at specific angles and distances in a certain amount of volume. In this case I think I had about 500 particles a second generated moving at 50m/s -y. with a -1 y gravity well.
This coupled with the collision matrix I set up for the ground, launch pad and tower. (Something like 1mm distance reflective bounce, static movement, with hard dislocation)
Basically that means, all the little particles (1 point polygons) shoot out of the engines really fast and bounce around off of the ground and stuff dispersing outward.
Now I have my animation, so I load up hypervoxels and apply it to that object emitter. (I think I named it engine exhaust)
Then I messed with the surface settings to make it looke like smoke, and react to main lights I placed around the outside of the engine to give it a nice brightness. Then I added a color map, which was transparent at the very top, then blue briefly, then transparent again, then goes into the white smoke. (To get the effect of the engines firing)
then a luminosity map, to make it brighter the closer it got to the engines...this added a little to the brightness of hte lights.
then I made it fairly opaque, so that light passed through it really well, the more smoke light has to go through the more shadows it produces.
now what hypervoxels actually did was create a sphere of true 3-d space around each particle being emitted, (Not quite a sphere I set up a motion distortion so the sphere formed it's oblong shape depending on it's velecoty and angle) which light reacts to in 3-d. Since I made the spheres all about 750mm, with a 250% random size variation possibility, it was able to meld all of the spheres that were close enough into a single object, with cloud lke protrusions on it. if a particle strayed too far from the mass, it would become it's own cloud.
And that is what hypervoxels can do in a nutshell.
It can also create realistic snow, rain, explosions(space and planetside with gravity), water fountains, ocean spray, squirting liquids like blood or a water hose, dripping liquids, gasses, steams, nebulaes, solar flares, bushes, trees, gun fire, tracer rounds, you can set up the emitter to be effected by gravity, wind, other objects, make the hypervoxels land on objects, (Truely realistic snow buildup on a car for example), staligmites, floatign blood like in star trek the undiscovered country, shockwaves,etc etc etc etc...hope that answers a few questions
Rob
