Are you looking to up the realism of your artwork? Or maybe you just want to make your sci-fi spaceship that much cooler? Either way, this simple shader for you! It allows you to create perfect engine effects with an inexhaustible combination of colors, shapes and sizes and elevate your space renders and animations to a whole new level. Anything from plasma rockets with magnetic nozzles, through Hall-effect ion thrusters to chemical rockets, this shader can do it all.

Animation preview:

The product includes a rocket exhaust shader as well as 6 example presets shown in the animation at the top of the product page. The shader is fully procedural and easily animated. It's intended for Blender Cycles, but from my limited testing it also works in Eevee for static scenes. To add the effect to your scene you just need to copy and paste one of the presets from the provided .blend file into your own project, from there you can either use the object you've just pasted in directly or you can add the "Rocket Exhaust" node group with object coordinates to any object of your choosing. Keep in mind that the plume starts at [0,0,0] coordinates while adding the node group to a new object.

Special thanks to:

Dennis Sereinig (ig:dennis.sereinig) for providing me with his spaceship renders using my shader.

Documentation:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/176UNT2RnEfVLP9bdPKnOnnDgfnNH_Jvt_bW2XUvvzWI/edit?usp=sharing