Afterburn

[tls246]

Edited for Google-y privacy.

[tls246]

Ditto this one.

[SoLiTuDe]

tls246: ...ya got me man -- I read the first one and I was totally lost. I think I get what you're saying, but why not get the particles to move the way you want (with vortex to spin 'em), add an aburn op and tell it to send out part. orientation, then use the aburn stretch to stretch it? (something like that should work i'm right on what you're getting after)

and doesn't / just divide? I would assume so, but don't see why not... I don't have much experience with the expressions... however any info you have attained would be useful to me I'm sure... I've actually never tried using expressions for afterburn but I'm sure that would actually be pretty useful to learn


edit: this what you're trying to do?
http://www.innersolitude.com/aburn_vortex1.jpg

[tls246]

Hi, Ian --

Yep, that's the effect I'm trying to pull off, and ordinarily I would've done exactly what you did. The trouble is that I'm doing a scientific visualization with stationary particles that are placed on the vertices of mesh read in from a data file, so the positions of the particles are important. If I have to, I *could* spin EVERYTHING, including my camera path, preserving the motion relative to the camera, but this seems like an inelegant solution. I oughta be able to do it with expressions, dang it! :)

Yeah, you'd think "/" would divide, wouldn't you? But it doesn't work in AB expressions. Weird.

Thanks for your help!

[SoLiTuDe]

Hehe... stupid scientific accuracy. Well I have absolutely no idea how to help ya then... but hey... I tried. :) What about apply an expression controller to the track you need? (or does this not work?) -- guess not actually... hmmm I dunno Good luck though! :)

[CameronHallam]

Just a quic one, it probably wont make much sense, but when ever i do smoke clouds or explosions and the like, when they are fading out and on the edges they look really uniform and well crap..like you can see balls which are soposed to be the smoke or whatever as they are fading out and doesnt look relistic..how do you give the sides a harsher and more relistic edge and fade out. I have tried the denisty and regularity but still looks the same.

Sorry if it doesnt make sense ill try attatching a pic later

[SoLiTuDe]

Not exactly sure... as a screenshot would def. help here, but I think what you need to do is make sure you're using the animation curves (afc) in afterburn to control mainly the sphere size, noise size and density.

[Gagui]

Hello.

Im trying to make a 3d storm scene. The attached pics are refs to do the job the client has given me.
The light of the thunders irradiates from within the clouds.
I need to do this effect.
I had tried to lower de density of the noise and put a very intensity omni light in the interior of the cloud cumulus but the render time increase too much.

Im thinking my workarround is not the correct. Maybe i should use the explode daemon to simulate the light coming fron the interior of clouds.

If any of you can help me with this one i'll apreciate it very much. Allan, your advices will be specially apreciated.

Thanks.

Sorry for my poor english.

[CapitanRed]

You don't need the explode deamon.
for faster rednders, make your density and the stepsize higher.

[feldy]

yea the explode deamon might be overkill it would work but rendertimes will be way more then you need. cheers

[CapitanRed]

can anyone tell me how to get this shakeing away?? I can't find the button which stops it. where does that come from?

[feldy]

well i dont even know what ur talking about man its like u left some info out.

[CapitanRed]

sorry man, i tought this is a known one, because i allready have read of people haveing this problem.

it appears when i render the animation with the afterburn volumentrics. all particles move left and right, as would there be a position noise controler on them.
I first tought AB would have something like a camera shake when using the explode deamon, or something like that, to give mor explosion motion to the render, but only the particles are moving like that.
i had that allready ones, but then it has suddenly disappeared, without knowing what i have changed.

am i the only one with that shake thing?

[Steve Green]

Hi,

I've had it as well - I sent a scene to Afterworks, but they said it rendered OK - I tried rendering it again and it was fine then.

Maybe some random bug?

Cheers

Steve

[Daniel-B]

Hey guys. I am really sleepy right now. It's almost 6 am and I haven't gone to bed yet...haha.

Anyway, I've been playing with Afterburn all night, trying to figure out a way to make the volumes look more realistic.

It occured to me that the shadowed side of the clouds/smoke usually doesn't have soft shadows like you would receive from ambient occlusion. Because it would take a LONG time to render ambient occlusion on an AB volume, I played with a technique that would give me a rough approximation. It's not phsycially accruate but it looks better IMHO.

Anyway, here are the results...

This one is the "ambient occlusion" at full opacity. Notice the difference in detail...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v58/PixelMagic/CLOUD_AMBIENT_OCC_01.jpg



Of course, for a cloud, that is waaaay to pronounced, so with a little tweaking in compositing, we get this...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v58/PixelMagic/CLOUD_AMBIENT_OCC_02.jpg



Much more realisitc looking IMHO. Now, I can't go into how I did this right now, because I am really sleepy, and must go to bed. But I will try to write up a mini-tutorial on how to achieve this effect. It's really simple, and I think adds alot. Let me know what you think.

[CapitanRed]

steve green:

Yea, i know what you mean. i also had that some time ago, and it disappeared suddenly, and again it is gone without remarking what it could be. i don't understand that.

pixle magic:

this is nice. i would love to know how you did your ambient occlusion fake:)

[Morpheus09]

Hey MiguelPerez i send you a pm
could you share your exp max file
it would be so cool

[DeKo-LT]

PixelMagic, what is rendertime with and without Ambient Oclusion?

[Daniel-B]

There is almost no difference in render times. You see the "ambient occlusion" is really just a color gradient trick which makes the interior puffs of the cloud darker. That's all there is to it.

[yuriythebest]

Just a quic one, it probably wont make much sense, but when ever i do smoke clouds or explosions and the like, when they are fading out and on the edges they look really uniform and well crap..like you can see balls which are soposed to be the smoke or whatever as they are fading out and doesnt look relistic..how do you give the sides a harsher and more relistic edge and fade out. I have tried the denisty and regularity but still looks the same.

Sorry if it doesnt make sense ill try attatching a pic later

I have the same question- how does one make the smoke 'gently fade away', when the particles die then it looks very unrealistic- tried playing around with the materials for many hours to no avail.

[SoLiTuDe]

animate the density using an afc curve on it. Set the low value to whatever you want (the main density) and set the high value to 0. This will make afterburn go from density of 3 (or whatever you have set) and have it fade to 0 which will make it transparent... this is linked to particle age by default, but you may have to adjust the curve to make it look right

[feldy]

Ur Plow Also Needs A Life Time Or U Can Give The Life Time In The Ab Dialouge

[SoLiTuDe]

oh yeah -- totally forgot to mention that thanks!

[yuriythebest]

Thanks to vereyones replies, however I still couldn't do it- I've activated the noise afc to low=3, high=0, tried all the shaders. ALso did a Pflow age & death test, still there is no fading, just the rough dissapearing of smoke segments with the death of particles.

[superhypersam]

Make sure u set the density (not noise) too something like 1 to 0 now set the graph so it reaches the 0 point earlier than your death time in your pflow system.

I posted this link earlier with as an example on how to do a dirt explosion (very rough, very quick) but it has the ab voxels disapear with with age.

www.giantapestudios.com/pflow/explode.max (http://www.giantapestudios.com/pflow/explode.max)

that should illustrate the method.

[yuriythebest]

Yess! thanks everyone. Couldn't manage to make the smoke fade away with particle age, however with emitter distance works like a charm. Cheers!

[Daniel-B]

Hey guys. I keep having a problem with my nuclear explosion scene file. Sometimes when I render passes, it looks just fine, but other times when I render, the passes look like there is camera shake on them, when there is not. I also put a white sphere in the scene to track for stabilization if I needed to...but it DOES NOT shake, while the Afterburn rendered stuff does.. I don't get what is going on.

Here is an example render to see what I mean...

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=CFFC42DE6FC3BD63

[Steve Green]

Hi,

I've had the same problem - I sent a file to Afterworks, but they couldn't replicate it. So I reloaded the scene file and it was fine my end.

Does it still do it if you reload?

I've no idea what causes it, but it's annoying.

Cheers

Steve

[Daniel-B]

Well, Steve, I hope that fixes it. But I won't be able to let you know for another 16 hours until the new render is done. :shrug:

[toreriise]

I was experiencing the same problem, the camera was "shaking" while I was rendering a scene with a rocket smoke trail.

I reloaded the scene and the problem dissapeared.

[Daniel-B]

Yes, same here. I rendered my nuclear mushroom cloud again, and it doesn't shake now. All I did was reload the scene.

[darrennorthcott]

does anyone know of a good afterburn tutorial that can tell me ( or can any of you tell me) how to make qanimated fire that looks the kind in the attatched picture?

any help is greatly appreciated!!

Darren

[Steve Green]

To be honest, you're probably better off using lots of particles with wind turbulence to give the licks of flame.

Scale is very important with wind, try using very low values .002 say. Maybe use a couple at different scale/frequencies, and add a drag to stop them shooting off.

Also try an additive material with opacity and a dark reddish brown colour.

As the particles build up and overlap, it will brighten, so the core will be very bright and it will dim as the particles move away from each other.

If you've got access to a compositing application like after effects or combustion, you can take the particles and blur them together to get a more fluid effect.

Cheers,

Steve

[darrennorthcott]

thanks, i'll give that a try. So theres now way to make AB have that wispy/fluid style of flame to it? It seems to me that would be a relativly easy process for AB...but I'm new to it, so I could definatly be wrong.

[Steve Green]

You could probably get a wispy look by messing with the noise values, but I think the fluid motion would be easier to get just with particles.

Cheers

Steve

[DeKo-LT]

For fire waiting for chaousgroup Aura,
and afterburn i think is better for explosions, big puffy smoke or clouds ;)

[darrennorthcott]

does afterburn have an additive feature?

[amckay]

no not really, you can fake it to an extent with lights or just rely on lots of particles / density but ultimately no it's not additive which can be annoying sometimes, especially for fire etc. but nothing comping can't fix

[Daniel-B]

Hey guys. I'm working on creating a nuclear explosion for an independent film. Here is my afterburn shader so far. Any critiques on the shader/shape/lighting would be helpful.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v58/PixelMagic/Nuke7-18-06progression.jpg

[darrennorthcott]

Allan, thank you for your reply. I'm trying to create fire that will "flow" out from under a car, and I'm having problems getting the lighting and colors to look right. I will post a screenshot ASAP. Any help you could give me in regards to making a "fluid" style fire would be awsome. i got the motion from glu3d, but am struggling with the afterburn part.

cheers

Darren

[darrennorthcott]

here is the rendered screen shot so far...

I also found that when i rendered out the animation, even though i havn't animated the rotation or phase sections of afterburn, the AB particles are acting erratic.

is this because of the inhereited glu3d attributes?

[SoLiTuDe]

PixelMagic -- render with a dif color background so we can see some of the detail in the smoke =) It blends in with the black a little too much to really see what's going on. Otherwise it looks great so far! During the initial blast obviously blow it out a lot and if you fade into that it looks awesome!

[frankco]

Hi PixelMagic,

Wow, I haven't posted in here for quite a while. With my new job position, I don't have much spare time left.

What we can see looks great PixelMagic.

As good ol' Solitude said, it would be nice to see it on a lighter background. Not sure if you have dust falling from the mushroom cloud as it rises. Are you using sticky particles attached to geometry for the mushroom head? It would be great if we could see an animation of the explosion.
If you can spare some change, Andy Murdock has a great tutorial and Max files for a Nuc explosion. He gives some great pointers on creating a very good simulation.

Check out his explosion here.
http://www.lotsofrobots.com/movies/Mushrooms.htm

Solitude, checked out your demo reel. Man, you've been busy. Nice effects and modeling. I'm going to hit you up for some pointers.

Cheers,
frankco

[Daniel-B]

I'm actually using Andy Murdock's tutorial for the nuke. I bought his DVD.

I've been playing around with the shader more. Hopefully I can post the results soon.

[SoLiTuDe]

Hehe... thanks frankco for the compliments. I'm actually going to be re-doing my reel real soon with some new stuff (i need a real job!) So hopefully it comes out a bit better and more focused on what i really wanna do instead of so generalized. ...I'm also going to be utilizing my school's computers for rendering so I don't have to wait a freakin' year to finish half of my stuff. I've got a lot of tests and such, but nothing rendered/finished... very hard to get motivated sometimes.

I've really been wanting to see that andy murdock tutorial... but can't spare the change for it (gotta have the internet!) I kind of figured some of it out with szymon masaik's dvd, (you can see it in my reel... but it's not nearly up to par with pixelmagics!) but still want that dvd just for that effect! :)

[amckay]

d00d! pixelmagic great work!

[feldy]

dood that is pretty sweet dude do u mind posting ur ab settings

also what the hell is ur render times for that?

[Daniel-B]

Thank you for the compliments, guys.

I will post my nuclear settings when I am happy with the shader. I still have to tweak some more. Alot of the look is controlled via compositing though. It doesn't look like that straight out of the render. I am working on an independent film that features a nuclear attack sequence, so that is what I am busy with. I will tweak some more and post my settings soon.


Also guys, I have a question. Often times, I've seen volumetrics rendered in such a way that their lighting can be changed in compositing. Does anyone know a why to do that? This will illustrate what I mean....

https://www.walkereffects.com/products/channellighting/#

[g8ff]

You basically render seperate RGB of the volumetric and control the lighting based on this info in the comp. I'm think the most recent example I've seen around here was the pebble commercial DD did a while back.

[charleyc]

If you mean a 'way' to do that, use 3 lights, one Red, one Blue and one Green from your different lighting angles. One is your key, the others are your fills, or however your specific needs are.

[jussing]

Also guys, I have a question. Often times, I've seen volumetrics rendered in such a way that their lighting can be changed in compositing. Does anyone know a why to do that?

Yup, like the others say, use red, green and blue lighting.

Then render seperate diffuse and lighting passes from Max using "render elements".

Then you can seperate them in After Effects, using "set channels", like in the attached picture (this should also be done for the blue and green channels).

Then you can multilpy each light source pass with the diffuse pass, and add those three together, to get a good comp. And then you can tweak the opacity of each light source individually.

It looks a lot easier with that plugin you linked to, but you don't really need it. :)

Cheers,
- Jonas

[Daniel-B]

Yup, like the others say, use red, green and blue lighting.

Then render seperate diffuse and lighting passes from Max using "render elements".

Then you can seperate them in After Effects, using "set channels", like in the attached picture (this should also be done for the blue and green channels).

Then you can multilpy each light source pass with the diffuse pass, and add those three together, to get a good comp. And then you can tweak the opacity of each light source individually.

It looks a lot easier with that plugin you linked to, but you don't really need it. :)

Cheers,
- Jonas


Excellent, thank you, sir.

[SoLiTuDe]

I can't seem to get afterburn to output a diffuse and/or lighting pass. I've checked "create image channels" in the afterburn renderer rollout, and added those passes to the render elements, but I can't get anything to show up in those passes

[jussing]

Hmm, damn that. I haven't tried Afterburn yet.

Then another approach could be to forget about the diffuse pass, and just render out with the three different colors, and see how that works in comp.

- Jonas

[feldy]

i know for a fact they did in max 7 maybe there is a bug in 8 ill have to try at work later

[MiguelPerez]

Hi guys, interesting post :)

I post a tornado sequence to recieve some critiques and learn more. Is done with AfterBurn, but the particle motion is Houdini. :)

HiRes Image:
http://img363.imageshack.us/img363/2751/tornadocityew2.jpg

[SoLiTuDe]

very good for sure... I'd love to know how you can export houdini particles to max! How'd you composite it also? (Ie the workflow you did for having it in front of some buildings and not others)

[CapitanRed]

this looks very hot!! but does it also do when it moves??:)

is the whole town a photo, or are there some modeled parts? or is all modeld?(then you have done a damn good job:applause:)

I like your AB shader...have no crits for it.

[superhypersam]

Hello,

very nice work, my only crit,
scale seems a little off on the lower spinning mass, gives the impression of a smaller tornado.
but maybe thats just an intergration issue.

I would also be interested in how u exported houdini parts to max

[MiguelPerez]

Thanks :)

I've exported the particles via *.bin realflow particle file. I have the export plugin in houdini, and the import pluginin in max.

The city is a simply mattepaint composed by one chicago picture, and another with cloudy sky, with color corrected. In max I've placed some matte buildings (Boxes) in buildings location in five minues. The compostition of the layers was done in ombustion.

I attach a small Making off showing the steps.

[SoLiTuDe]

very cool miguel thanks for that idea for the particles... i'm gonna go try that now

[amckay]

Not sure if anyone answered this and not sure if you're using any specific technique, but if you were to say render 'elements' to get your diffuse/lighting passes for afterburn, it'll just come out in the atmospheric channel, not as diffuse/lighting. Afterburn is an atmospheric so isn't rendered into the other channels.

What you're best off doing is making your effect, and then making a 100% grey (or better dark grey, but Black I don't think will illuminate properly?) of that shader and render that out for lighting. Diffuse just kill the receive and cast shadows I guess. However essentially you aren't able to extract all of this info from max in one render which sucks. Usually you'll just need a diffuse and shadow and light passes at the most. I'm lazy and rarely ever render more than one pass of an afterburn effect unless it specifically requires it, however guys like Chris Pember tend to a bit more, and the results really show (bastard). So if you have the render power and someone's already gagged and beaten your producer so they're not wanting it yesterday, then by all means render out multiple passes!

[SoLiTuDe]

thanks allan... I kind of figured as much with what you said with having a "grey" pass.. been playing with it quite a bit lately... I bet though, that plugin from walker effects makes a big difference for sure in terms of ease of use, I guess it'd help more if you're not 100% positive on what the final background would be in compositing or something along those lines and will possible need to tweak the lighting afterwards. The manual way of setting it up isn't too hard though I guess. But if you guys didn't already know, d2software is releasing nuke as an educational version, (thursday i think) :eek:so their rgb lighting thingamob should take care of it for us hopefully!

[jussing]

Allan,

why use a dark grey pass for lighting? I would suppose you'd bet better dynamic range to play with in compositing, if you just used white?

Or is the dark color to prevent the multiple light sources from overexposing?

Edit: hmm, I suppose the "multiple" wouldn't make a difference here, since they're red, green and blue, hence they won't add to each other's channels.

Thanks,
- Jonas

[amckay]

Hey guys, I meant make your afterburn shader dark and put your colours on that, you're right you don't want it bright because it will over expose. Afterburn atmospherics can't render out as float32 so you can't pull them back down. You also don't want black as there are troubles with illuminating black on atmospherics, as well as you might want your shadows in there too. Ideally this is the way to go with it if you want to limit your renders down to purely two renders or so. In a perfect world you would set up each light pass seperate and shadows too, and make a beauty pass. However I'm just supplying a solution for having control without needing emense amounts of renders.

Most of the afterburn stuff I'm doing at Blur Studios right now is all one pass, I'll get it to look as close to what I want in 3D and then grade the rest in comp, however the more passes you have the more freedom and flexibility you get later without needing rerenders.

[Daniel-B]

I've had a problem with Afterburn when compositing. I render out my Afterburn nuke mushroom cloud. I render it out as a TGA 32bit with Alpha Channel. When I composite it, bringing it into After Effects as a premultiplied alpha, there is a slight halo around the edges. But when I change it to straight alpha, it doesn't look much better.

Humm, maybe I can post a screen shot later.

[superhypersam]

Hello,

a solution for the halo issue is to use the plate as your background image to render on.
Try giving the plate a few pixel blur as well.
Then do everything else as normal.

used this method for a tornado, worked well.

cheers


p.s. dont beleive Allan, Im watching him work, he is clearly using some evil aussie voo doo
magic.

[SoLiTuDe]

p.s. dont beleive Allan, Im watching him work, he is clearly using some evil aussie voo doo
magic.

I had my suspicions...! I'm totally giving you one of these "useful" clicks on this one :)

[amckay]

yeah I thought that was you checking me out Sam, geez I know this place doesn't have many girls, but I didn't think you'd revert to Jail passion to get through your 9-5!

[feldy]

hahhahaahhahhaaha thats funny lol so allan ur back in la huh sweet. venice is a nice place to work a few of us was there yeasterday bitching about why we couldnt work down there instead of the valley gotta love the beach down there.

[PsychoSilence]

yeah I thought that was you checking me out Sam, geez I know this place doesn't have many girls, but I didn't think you'd revert to Jail passion to get through your 9-5!

that´s supposed to be mesher´s habit :D PLUS we´re talking in the AFTER burn forum... ;)

[amckay]

Yeah back in California again, was just friggin here for Superman Returns. Not sure how long I'm in town for, I might stick until mid Nov, or else I might go home next month. But if anyone's keen to organize for a few people to get together for a beer, I'm always keen. As long as it's in Santa Monica/Venice area - as I'm short of a car.

[feldy]

dude I'd totaly would love to drink a beer with ya. sounds to me like youd be drinking me under the table here lol i acutaly just found a place right on the boardwalk in venice for pretty dam cheap if i might add to bad they want a year lease. blur being nice and sticking you in a hotel while your down here or did u have to find a place?

[Strob]

Hi everyone,


I remember seeing a website with a lot of realllllly cool afterburn effects. The guy was selling footage of smoke, fire, and incredibly cool atomic explosion all done with afterburn and maybe some maya fluids.

But I lost the address.... Does anyone of you remember the address of this website?


Thanks.

[Daniel-B]

Is this what you were looking for?

http://finalight.com/-/INDEX.HTM

[Strob]

Ha yeah thanks! That's it. I remembered seeing it on the Sitni sati website.

[amckay]

yeah I'm always put up in a hotel, however I have to say blur always puts me in the worst hotels I've ever stayed in - anyone from Blur who reads this will agree :) but it's all good, not like I spend much time there!

I can probably guess the names of the bars down near venice pier. either hinanos or the whaler?

ohwell all should organize to have a beer sometime!

[feldy]

how long you intown for im moving over the weekend but uhh and i dont drink on work nights that can be a bad habbit lol but if your gunna stick around for a while im up for a few rounds as long as the bar has some gloden tee so i can keep my golf game up lol cheers...

[amckay]

kindaup in the air right now, going to find out later this week whats up and make plans accordingly

ug
I ate too much today
my poor stomach

[u_k77]

hey guys...i'm really sorry to interupt here...well..just wondering if the particles are rendering properly here...i beleive not...looking for some advices...pls have a look at the attached file..the dust is not what icsee in the viewport...am i wrong somewhere?

warm regards

uttam

[SoLiTuDe]

checkin' out your file -- dust looks funky for sure

Figured it out... sucks though I had already typed it all out, and then when I hit save changes I got the darned maintenance thingy, so I'll make it shorter this time, then do a ctrl+c just in case!

The flow is a little funky in two spots so I think that's what is messing it up or freaking afterburn out.

First: Take out your age test of 25 +/- 5 and replace it with a delete operator set to by particle age (this saves an extra calculation, and keeps the delete in the same event.

Second: Where the dust gets messed up is the collsion test going out to a new event then spawning particles, instead of testing for a collision, just drag your spawn in event01 up over the collision test, and reconnect it... should fix your problem.

I'd go over some of the dust settings, they seem just a wee lot a bit overkill, even though it does look pretty good, you can probably find some faster settings that look good (lower noise levels, higher density, etc) Anywho... have fun! :)

[Mafx]

Hey,

I know this is the same tired ole question but I can't get rid of the smoke just 'popping' away when the particles die. I have an effect that has an explosion in the middle then two fireballs extending away.. as the smoke 'fades' I have a logo coming through it. Problem is the smoke doesn't fade it just pops off, it is there then gone.. I want to have some whispy sort of fading smoke at the end of the explosion and I am screwed if I can get it right!!

Any tips on this.

MAx 8 using pf and Afterburn 3.2

THANKS

[PsychoSilence]

Hy all!

i will have the task to create aurora borealis or better known as northern lights in a few days...any suggestions for a workaround?

thanks in advance

(an extreeeemyl stressed) anselm

[SoLiTuDe]

Hey,

I know this is the same tired ole question but I can't get rid of the smoke just 'popping' away when the particles die. I have an effect that has an explosion in the middle then two fireballs extending away.. as the smoke 'fades' I have a logo coming through it. Problem is the smoke doesn't fade it just pops off, it is there then gone.. I want to have some whispy sort of fading smoke at the end of the explosion and I am screwed if I can get it right!!

Any tips on this.

MAx 8 using pf and Afterburn 3.2

THANKS

It's kind of some tricky settings to get it right, but mostly it's just animating the density to falloff by age quicker than the sphere size usually. So you'll have to adjust the afc for it to fade properly. Animating the noise size / gains will alos help with your wispy effect... Expect higher render times for the lower density frames. And of course step size can also play a big role in how good it looks with how fast it renders.

Hy all!

i will have the task to create aurora borealis or better known as northern lights in a few days...any suggestions for a workaround?

thanks in advance

(an extreeeemyl stressed) anselm

Hrmmm... I have no idea, but using a few trillion particles might get a good result. :)
Ok, actually I think if you used afterburn with some really soft clouds to get the basics going that should work pretty well... the only problem I can really see coming up is getting the shape and animation right. I would honestly go a 2d particle route (ie particle illusion/combustion, etc...) as it might be a lot easier... depends on the effect you actually need. (ie do you need to move through it?)

[DeKo-LT]

Hy all!

i will have the task to create aurora borealis or better known as northern lights in a few days...any suggestions for a workaround?

thanks in advance

(an extreeeemyl stressed) anselm

Speedsix (http://www.speedsix.com/) have great plugin in Monsters Pack for Digital Fusion (http://www.eyeonline.com/) - Aurora.

More you can view here:
http://www.cmivfx.com/product_speed6.asp

Highly recommended :thumbsup:

[DeKo-LT]

Also you can try to blur simple particles, like in my old example:
http://www.orbaz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21&start=15

[PsychoSilence]

hey great to have such rich and fast replys :D i really owe you one!

i will consider all of them and hopefully post some results soon (within the next zwie days or so). i will share the result ;) the thing is would like to have it as flexible as possible. allready played around with a small but long plane as emitter with a noise and wave modifier on it i can pointcache and retime at any state...

[Mafx]

Hey Sol,

Good answer, I have some tweaking to do but a basic render indicated that it will do the trick - now time to get the settings correct.

A second point I am stuck on. Clouds, has anyone nailed clouds in any decent fashion. I am looking at the Stealth opening titles type fly through cloud sort of effect to do for a client logo. My clouds look like big puffs of smoke.. in some fashion that could be correct but they don't look convincing enough as to give off the impression you are actually in the sky.

THANKS :)

[Daniel-B]

Hey Sol,

Good answer, I have some tweaking to do but a basic render indicated that it will do the trick - now time to get the settings correct.

A second point I am stuck on. Clouds, has anyone nailed clouds in any decent fashion. I am looking at the Stealth opening titles type fly through cloud sort of effect to do for a client logo. My clouds look like big puffs of smoke.. in some fashion that could be correct but they don't look convincing enough as to give off the impression you are actually in the sky.

THANKS :)

Here are some that I made following one of Allan's tutorials.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v58/PixelMagic/CLOUD_AMBIENT_OCC_02.jpg

And here is that tutorial...

http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/75

[Mafx]

doh.. of course.

I thought I saw something like that on one of the DVDs but I am not a home for a few more days and can't get the disk to see.

Thanks for the link, I will work through that.

S.

[CapitanRed]

hey pixel magic, how did you do that ambient occlusion fake?

[amckay]

Great work there mate! those tuts are kinda old, think these days I'd say pull the shadows opacity down a bit so there's less bled out shadow color. That fake ambient occlusion idea is great work btw!

[Daniel-B]

hey pixel magic, how did you do that ambient occlusion fake?

What I did was play with the color ramps so that the "crevices" of the puffs were black, and so that the outside of the puffs were white. Then composited this on top of the first render, and adjusted opacity to taste.

I'm working on a paying gig right now, but after that, I'll write up a couple of tutorials on the subject.

And thanks, Allan, for the compliment.

[Mafx]

if this comes through twice, I got the server busy message when I submitted this before..

I am doing a fly through the sky where the camera is following an object til it gets to the 'stage' area for the sequence. I was going to set up numerous particle systems through-out the area to represent the clouds, is that a clunky way to do it or is that pretty much the way.

I am not making the sky choc-o-block with clouds, but enough to give the feeling of moving through the sky.

Thanks.

[u_k77]

Thanks solitude
That really helped...AB is Ok but i need a lot of work in PF.

Thanks once again

Uttam

[Mafx]

Hey all,

Can I get some feedback / thoughts on these two AB animations. They are for a client logo intro, obviously set in the sky.

I am not happy with the explosion (yeh they saw Stealth) as the front of it does not have the 'fury' I am looking for, any suggestions would be GREAT.

http://www.meshandfx.com.au/3dwork/cloudFly4.mov
http://www.meshandfx.com.au/3dwork/explodeSpline.mov

They are a couple of meg each.

Thanks.

[Glacierise]

Hello guys,

I have this weird problem with AB - it only renders when I render a camera view. I can't render perspective or other view - everything else is there but not AB. How could I fix that?

Thanks,
Hristo

[SoLiTuDe]

Hey all,

Can I get some feedback / thoughts on these two AB animations. They are for a client logo intro, obviously set in the sky.

I am not happy with the explosion (yeh they saw Stealth) as the front of it does not have the 'fury' I am looking for, any suggestions would be GREAT.

http://www.meshandfx.com.au/3dwork/cloudFly4.mov
http://www.meshandfx.com.au/3dwork/explodeSpline.mov

They are a couple of meg each.

Thanks.

Not bad on both -- the clouds one needs some work around the edges of the clouds, they're too white I think. I can't for the life of me think of how to change that, but that's really all I can say =) The spline one should be faster I think, and have an explosion when they collide. :thumbsup:


Hello guys,

I have this weird problem with AB - it only renders when I render a camera view. I can't render perspective or other view - everything else is there but not AB. How could I fix that?

Thanks,
Hristo


Dunno why it wouldn't work in perspective view, but I know it doesn't work in any of the orthographic views (front left right top, user) but perspective and camera are pretty much the same thing, so there's no reason it shouldn't work, make sure it's not a user view, and then try again

[Mafx]

where they collide is going to be another effect that the logo will come from so it is all taken care of. I want the head of the explosion to have more 'flamey turmoil' to it like a rolling fireball as I want the camera to be closer to it but at the moment I can get it to look like that.

Thanks for the comments though, I will work on the cloud edges some more.

Cheers.

[Glacierise]

Heh, it was a user view, I am an idiot :)

@Mafx: Dude, try to animate your phase more, also increase the number of particles, and use the 'perturbation' params of the expl demon ;)

[CapitanRed]

Mafx, i think you can get darker clouds, when you make your light more blue. In my mind you should lower the density, so they give more of a soft feeling. to not lose the details, you can then increase the stepsize and falloff. but this is only my mind.
another thing is, that your sky is damn blue. and everywhere the same. this gives a toonish look.
perhaps you should use a gradient, going to white at the bottom.

[Mafx]

thanks for the feedback lads. The blue is a temp. I have a ground mesh way down below the clouds to just have some ground down there and I am thinking of just using a bitmap in the background for the clouds to fill in the area where there is no particle cloud. Hard to explain what I mean but 'also in my mind :) ' I have an idea of what I am trying to achieve.

Thanks for the tips, I will have a try tonight and chuck some renders up when max churns them out.

Cheers.

[Matt^]

Also you can try to blur simple particles, like in my old example:
http://www.orbaz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21&start=15

Deko, your old particle example is fantastic! Really impressed. I actually prefer it to the point rendering examples i've seen. Would it be possible to see a render of the particle animation before you put the post effects on?

Or failing that, a description of the number of particles used/pflow setup etc. I'm interested in knowing how many particles is required to achieve that effect.

Cheers! :thumbsup:

[DeKo-LT]

Deko, your old particle example is fantastic! Really impressed. I actually prefer it to the point rendering examples i've seen. Would it be possible to see a render of the particle animation before you put the post effects on?

Or failing that, a description of the number of particles used/pflow setup etc. I'm interested in knowing how many particles is required to achieve that effect.

Cheers! :thumbsup:
From there you can download 3dsmax and AE project ;).
Number of particles is depend how many tentacles is visible, but approximately is 10 000 - 50 000.
Here is screen before post production:
http://img78.imageshack.us/img78/7990/spwanelectrbig0109no3.th.jpg (http://img78.imageshack.us/my.php?image=spwanelectrbig0109no3.jpg)
Very simple... :)

[Matt^]

Oops, didn't think of looking at the max file :D

Great stuff, thanks! :applause:

[Glacierise]

Hi all,
This is my first real attempt at an AB explosion stuff, here:

Airstrike (http://cravenous.com/airstrike.avi)

Crits, pls!

[feldy]

can you post a non blurry version?

[Mafx]

Hey folks,

Here is the next part of this logo animation. This is the first 2/3 of the explosion when the looping parts collide.

http://www.meshandfx.com.au/3dwork/explode6.mov (http://www.meshandfx.com.au/3dwork/explodeSpline.mov)

We had a black out when this was rendering, that's why the anim doesn't go all the way to the end - but you get the idea.

Thanks.

Oh it is 1.3 meg.

[Mafx]

With the air strike maybe you should scale the effect up a bit, goes from nothing to full size in a sply second. Maybe just animation the sphere size just over a couple of frames to show some quite growth of the explosion or something.

[Glacierise]

@Mafx: Yeah, I noticed the same thing - fixed, with a lot of other stuff :) Take a peek at the new version - I think it's much better:

PFlow & Afterburn airstrike (http://cravenous.com/airstrike.avi)

Also, dude, you could give me your scene, to play around a bit :) I think I can help ;)

[MiguelPerez]

It looks nice Glacerise :). But I think the explosions are very fast, you should reduce the velocity.

[Glacierise]

Hm, I tried it, but it doesn't look neither realistic, nor convincing :)

[amckay]

cool explosions, I'd say the stretch is a little too high, put it down lower so you get better motion?

but nice work!

[mustan9]

Can someone help me?

When I render a scene with AfterBurn and ParticleFlow there is a strange black box showing up in the renders. What is it? and how do I get rid of it?

[Glacierise]

Post a scene, so we can help ;)

[SoLiTuDe]

Post a scene, so we can help ;)

yeah... what he said

[mustan9]

Post a scene, so we can help ;)

Sure. Here's frame 100 and you can see this black box that doesn't exist in the project. Strange isn't it?

http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/8025/imagewr0.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Also I attached the Max file.

[SoLiTuDe]

hrmm... really wierd... i've been messing with it, but can't nail the exact problem. I know it's the way the flow is set up, but don't know exactly what it is. I think putting the age test in the last event and the aburn in that even will help too ( I think this is where the problem actually is). Also... there's no need for materials or a scale operator if you don't have any shape attached... I suggest using afterburn to scale the shape (afc)... I eventually got it to work, but then it was freakin' out on me, so I've temporarily given up :D

Hope it helps... good luck!

--Ian

[Morpheus09]

hmm that is realy strange
can´t tell you what the problem is but her is a working version
i changed the pflow
now you can change the size in AB

i hope this can help you

[mustan9]

Great! Thanks guys.

When I rendered the old project I notice that the box was jumping around. Not always rendering in the same place. Very strange isn't it.

The box only seems to show up when AF is referencing the AF node in pflow. If I just pick the pflow as the emitter source then the box goes away, but I loose the particle size option in AF.

[SoLiTuDe]

try using a sphere shape then, so you have afterburn reference something other than just scale. They have no actual geometry as of now, and usually i've just always used afterburn to control the size, so maybe it needs something to reference a little better? I dunno... just a thought. I don't have the time to go and try it right now... but maybe I'll mess it with some more later tonight.

[Glacierise]

cool explosions, I'd say the stretch is a little too high, put it down lower so you get better motion?

but nice work!

Wow, a shoulder tap from the master! That's encouraging :) I know i can improve it a bit more but I'll leave it there for now - too much other stuff to do, and this is good enough for a demo.

Thanks a lot!

[onionringofdoom]

I'm trying to create an effect like something burning, just a normal fire, it could be a torch for all I care :P The example file that came with AB isn't particularly realistic though, and I'm looking for a lot of realism. Anyone have any ideas?

[DeKo-LT]

For quicker result I will choose Afterburn Combustion with custom map for density.
Map can be similar to this:
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/5020/noisexu1.th.jpg (http://img230.imageshack.us/my.php?image=noisexu1.jpg)

Also don't forget to animate a noise phase a little bit ;).
AB combustion works only with atmospheric gizmos, you can drive gizmos with particles like here:
http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/mxs5/pflow/pflow__MovingObjects.htm

Hope this helps ;)

[CapitanRed]

is this fiery enough?

www.megalomania.ch/pirate/vfx_Atmosphere0214.tif (http://www.megalomania.ch/pirate/vfx_Atmosphere0214.tif)

it is colored with an explode deamon.
there is some velocity stretch
noise is fBm turbulence tendrills, cubic falloff, noise size is same as particle size when they are born.no change in the noise size, but in te particles size. noise levels is low, gain is high, bias is low, blur is high, and detail is low.

and the phase is animated. this gives some motion in it. and i think i putted some motion drag in it, so you get more the feeling the fire is going upwards. don't know exactly if there is a lot of motion drag in it.

make sure you have similar or darker colors in the color parameters as they are in the explode daemon, or you'll get white when glow is strong.

i think this is all...
hope i could help :)

[mustan9]

That looks very cool.

The alpha isn't very strange, and I think most of the effect would disappear if composted over a bright background. As long as this is going overtop of something dark it will work nicely.

I think the blue looks a little unnatural, but if that's the effect your going for.

[onionringofdoom]

I decided to base my flame off the example one provided. I tweaked it a lot, but I'm not too sure just how realistic this flame is. I do want the edges to be a bit harder as the flame goes up, though. Oh, and a lot slower too, but that shouldn't be too hard to do.

EDIT: Wait, yeah the speed thing has me stumped too...

http://www.rit.edu/~jla2125/flametest.avi (http://www.rit.edu/%7Ejla2125/flametest.avi)

[mustan9]

Because AF is particle based it's hard to give it that fluid effect that natural fire has.

Have a look at the fire done with glu3d. This is a rendered geometry.

http://3daliens.com/glu3D/index.htm

I'm not sure how you would create something like that in AF.

AF does good fire when you hide some it behind thick smoke, but something like burning spill of fuel I don't know how to do it.

[onionringofdoom]

Currently I'm getting a lot better results from AB than the examples or gallery scenes that were made using glu. Pretty much all I need to do to make my fire perfect is to slow it down a lot.

[Glacierise]

What I have found so far is that a realistic flame is best made when 3 particle systems are used simultaneously:

1. metaball - blobmesh or pwrapper. Gives the body of the flame - the tendrills.
2. a 'shape facing' system - to give the color and intensity
3. an AB system - for the smoke.

I'll post a scene soon ;)

[onionringofdoom]

Hmm, metaballs. I'll have to try that one out. Please post the scene soon, that will be a big help! Also, what do you mean by 'shape facing'?

[onionringofdoom]

http://www.giantapestudios.com/Anim/Glu_fire.mov
HOLY SHIT. That's done with glu. That's EXACTLY the effect I'm going for. The guy who made it is apparently making a tutorial soon, but he described his process as this:

"emit glu particles onto a ball with high friction, so u get that nice sliding along a surface feel,
then send those particles threw a pflow birth op,
use a deflector to "select" the upper particles,
then spawn 60/70% particles from those selected particles,using a rate by distance.
Apply a couple of winds one for the upward force the other for the noise effect and add a lil drag,
Pwrapp the hole thing"

If someone could tell me what all that means, that'd be great. I'll try to figure some of it out though.

[Glacierise]

Not glu exactly, but pwrapper - the mentioned metaballs. Sam's effect is really great, but he's too worked up to make a tut right now :) Have some patience, I'll post the scene tomorrow :) Mine's not as good, but also looks realistic :)

[onionringofdoom]

Ok, here's what I've whipped up using only AB, in terms of fire. Personally, I think it looks pretty darn realistic.

http://www.rit.edu/~jla2125/flametest.avi (http://www.rit.edu/%7Ejla2125/flametest.avi)

Does anybody know of a good way to like, mask the spawn point? Cause there's this weird flicker effect thing going on at the base of the fire there, and it looks kinda weird.

[feldy]

yea just use a curve that animates the opacity up from 0

[darkdreams]

Hi! I'm just new in this of pflow and anfterburn, yet i made somethings with it.

But I wanna make the sand effect of the mummy ( the big sand wall with imoteps face, you know, the one that is going to attack the plane).

Can someone give me a guide or tip about how to do this?

[jussing]

I wanna make the sand effect of the mummy ( the big sand wall with imoteps face, you know, the one that is going to attack the plane).

Can someone give me a guide or tip about how to do this?
Hmm, my guess is that's more of an animation problem than a volumetric rendering problem (first, at least), so try in the Particle Flow forum. :)

Cheers,
- Jonas

[darkdreams]

Ok, thnks Jussing :thumbsup:

[rebolt]

Guys please help me out. I am working on a fx scene which includes a lot of smoke blowing away in air like on war front so i have developed this smoke test using afterburn the problem iam facing is i want bigger puffs of smoke and mine includes quite small but so many. Iam also attaching a ref. of the smoke i want to exactly look like, not from the shading point of view but more from its puffiness and nature.
So please help me out.

Reference:

http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/9729/regular1535393r1croppedfh6.jpg

Smoke Test:

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/8661/smoketestla5.jpg

I want the smoke to look like the above ref. with bigger puffs and more big.

Thanks

[SoLiTuDe]

funny... I had to do something very similar a week or two ago. I'll be posting it as soon as I'm allowed (but that might be in feb-march ish :sad:) The trick to this one is finding the right density and step size. To get the soft look, you really have to lower the density (longer render times) and crank up the step size to a reasonable level for rendertime and quality (depends on the size of the spheres and such)

For this scene, I found that using less particles and cranking up the sphere size helps a lot, ...your plume probably have more turbluence on your particles, so the shape is more irregular, and not so cylindrical. Is your light a yellow color? I'd probably just make it white, and then use a dark gray ambient color in the afterburn (keyless) and use a single white for the shading color), then if get it to look right, you can either tweak the afterburn light to suit the lighitng, or just color correct in post. I also find that afterburn tends to saturate any lights that have colors in them.

What kind of scene scale is yours at? I was doing smoke plumes that ran at -3000 frames to get to the top of a skyscaper so you get you an idea of the scale... and I had a lot of trouble figuring out density numbers and such... the scale of the scene will play a big role in getting the right numbers for density, spehre size, noise size... etc... etc... I find that smaller scenes are much easier to control... but by doing everything in scale means that it may actually act more realistically overall.

[rebolt]

Thanks solitude it really helped. Actually i was just facing problem with the puffs that's it. Ok one more thing by reducing the density its looking quite cool and almost to the quality what i want but dude its taking a huge time like 18 min. for a single frame with 320x240 size and the particles was only 300.

[Glacierise]

And that's why you increase the step size. It is VERY important, and often overlooked, to match the step size with the scene's scale. You must find the biggest step size that works for you, before you render your whole animation - to avoid absurdly long renders. Try playing with it.

[rebolt]

I don't know why its happening but as i decrease or increase the no. of particles or something there's always a gap between the puffs as if they look more irregular. What can i do ?

Thanks

[CapitanRed]

perhaps your winds turbulence is to strong.
or the scale to high or to low...
try having bigger spheresize.
and show all particles in the viewport with AB-sphere, so you can see which change solves your probleme.

if you have a cache operator in your p-flow( if you use pflow), try to turn it of, and change something. someimes it does not update.

[rebolt]

Howcome we can make dust with afterburn ? Actually iam working on it and the main thing which i played with is "Density" but the thing is the dust is looking more of a noisy rather than smooth and more in turbulance how can we correct that ?

[Glacierise]

Use the spots noise type. Depending on the dust, you will have to animate some parameters - particularly the phase.

[Glacierise]

Anybody had luck getting the demon link map working? It is supposed to be cool, but I couldn't make it work, and the reference wasn't too clear :)

[rebolt]

Well thank you guys. It helped alot, so i am on my way for developing vfx scenes for my showreel. I have made one. So i thought to share with you guys to know your reviews. It almost took my 2 weeks to end this scene after doing again and again r&d with smoke and their parameters to get the right type of smoke and dust i want for the scene to get more realism.

Here's the snapshot of the video:

http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/3419/ddfinaloutputwj0.jpg

All the vfx elements was done by me. So here's the video.

Link: http://s120.photobucket.com/albums/o180/re_edge/?action=view&current=DeadandDyings.flv

So check it out and i would be happy to know your comments.

Thanks

[nikolida]

Hi.. SoLiTuDe ..

I see post in April about Szymon Masiak dvd from turbosquid (http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/index.cfm/ID/271409) and found this DVD.

After playing with tutorial - rotating torus [ Basic_Explosion ] I found ....

If I disabled in PFlow operator deleted, only in firs frame I see Explode daemons.

In the rest of animation I haven't explode.

Can You explane Me conection of this two operation ...

Sory for My Eng.

ThanX

[SoLiTuDe]

Glacierise: I've had no luck with them... haven't had a reason to use them yet either really...

Rebolt: Looks great! :)

Nikolida:
i think what you said was if you remove the "delete" operator the explode daemon doesn't work right...

the Delete operator in pflow creates the particle age that afterburn refers to, and will be needed for anything that requires change over time such as sphere size or the explosion daemon's multipliers and such. So if anything leave your delete operator in there with the *by particle age* selected and set the time to the length of your animation (usually what I do)

[nikolida]

ThanX.....

[rebolt]

Hey i am working on asteroids using afterburn and i want some good references of burning asteroids falling or meteors falling through which i can study the motion, smoke etc. Could anyone tell me where i could find these references.

Thanks

[SoLiTuDe]

what exactly are you going to do with the asteroids? Have them hit the ground? Burn up in the atmostphere?... there's no real video reference of asteroids besides the few pictures nasa has made form asteroids floating in outerspace... Otherwise i'd say check out armegeddon, and deep impact. The motorola pebl commercial is cool too (digital domain) if you're looking for earth-impact too. Cgacademy has a good dvd on afterburn where allanmckay kind of goes over this effect as well for say just a huge burning ball of fire...

[rebolt]

Thanks Solitude.

[benra]

Hi All... :) . I have searched this entire thread . some great tips from you guys, fantastic in fact. so big props out... but i am still having a problem where my AB render (fx of a low density wispy trail) ends up with a major flicker in it , which i cannot seem to as yet root out.

I have the AB noise anim set to local noise , so noise stays with my volume puffs. If these are static in space , i have much less flicker , so i think it might b a problem with noise properly staying with the puff as it moves through world space?? If local noise is unswitched then i get no flicker, but also no real movement of individual noises ,just the single global noise revealed by my particles which doesnt give the motion effect i am looking for.

Does this problem sound familiar to anyone?

[rebolt]

I just saw the commercial done by 'Digital Domain' for Motorola Pebl and just amazed to see the work and specially making of the commercial. In one shot of the making they have shown how they did the thick smoke simulation after asteroid hitting the ground and erupts thick amount of smoke and i want to know how did they get that simulation output in heating mode. Here's the capture of the video i am putting to get my point clear.

Snapshot

http://img240.imageshack.us/img240/3151/digitaldomainmakingofpepr7.jpg

This is the smoke particle system they made for the commericial and i was wondering that its really good way to show your simulation for breakdowns for your vfx scenes. But how can we achieve this type of effect of like heating mode with green, blue and yellow depth modes ?

Could anyone explain how we can do it ?

Thanks

[SoLiTuDe]

from what i understand that actually a "lighting pass" they can use the color information there to adjust colors better in post and compositing (they use Nuke) so like the green area is a the majority of the smoke or midtones i think, and the yellow at the bottom is where another light is for control of that light or something. ... basically you set up your scene and make it look pretty and render it pretty... then you go back in and create crazy colors for the lights, and then can go in a compositing program later to extract those portions of the image to use as lighting information. (or something like that) I've never succesfully done it to be honest... :) something such as this is used in after effects https://www.walkereffects.com/products/channellighting/

[rebolt]

I think you are right solitude. They used Nuke for compositing. I think too now that these are light passes. But still i am sorry i am not getting how to do it through compositing. I use combustion for compositing.

[SoLiTuDe]

that plugin I mentioned might work with combustion, but I really don't know the exact steps to setting up afterburn for it. I've never really had to go that in depth with the compositing. I've always been fine with basic color correction.

Edit: Go back to page 20-22 or so and you can read up a bit more on it :)

[MiguelPerez]

To put three colored lights in different angles is a common practice with volumetrics because allow you to change the light direction in postproduction without having to render again.

One example.

[SoLiTuDe]

pretty spiffy lookin' miguel... can you go into detail on the process in your compositing program though?

[MiguelPerez]

I just played multiplying the values of red green and blue, after I converted it to grey scale and added some gamma. Any plugin.

[SoLiTuDe]

cool... I'll have to play some more with it soon then =)

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

While trying to help someone in the Combustion forum I stumbled upon this link (http://www.seanskube.com/TS_Relighting.html) for compositing bent normals in AE. The subject is a puff of smoke, so this may be another approach to look into.

-Eric

[rebolt]

That's fine but i think still we are not sure why they have used it and by how we can achieve this result. We are just giving different examples to make it through light but none of us sure that why they have shown it and what exactly it symbolises. We can do the twaekings in lightining and stuff to achieve this result but this is useless to add this type of breakdowns in the showreel unless we are sure what we are showing to our recruiters. Any expert comments are needed here.

[SoLiTuDe]

the best way for me to describe it is that it's basically a really efficient way of working. For somebody like DD to render that stuff, it prob takes a really long time to render one frame... the fact that they can go back in later and change the lighting to better suit what a director wants or needs means that they don't have to spend days re-rendering the same scene over for DD to have it in their making of, I think it's just because it looks cool mostly... :)
Now... what I would do in my reel would be to first show the final... then do the deconstruction of the comp job (wipes and such showing dif layers) then I would show the rgb pass, then maybe take one of the lighting channels (say green for instance) and just show that by itself, then directly show how it adjusts the lighting, so they know what it's actually there for. This relates more to a compositing job, but it would show that you know something that not a lot of people know about too.. a skill worth having I'm sure... and it'd probably be something good to talk about on an interview.

[jussing]

In After Effects you just use a channel converter to isolate the red, green and blue channel, respectively. Then you multiply each of those layers with a diffuse/color layer, and add them together. I'm sure Combustion has something similar, or at least you can do it with levels like Miguel said.

:) Cheers,
- Jonas

[JHaywood]

I used this technique recently and would have to say that the reason to do it like this is more for control rather than setting it up to make changes to lighting. I can't say for sure because I've never worked at DD or a high-end FX house like that, but on a project like the Pebl commercial, I can almost guarantee that decisions like lighting are made way in advance and locked down by the time you get to final rendering of the effects. I can't imaging that they would start rendering a big smoke effect like that without knowing where the light is coming from. These things go through storyboards, animatics, color concepts, and other pre-production phases where the final look would be locked down way before you start doing the time-consuming final renders.

So the reason you'd want to seperate the smoke into RGB components is more to have complete control over the colors and light values. With this setup you can do more to fine tune the look than if you just rendered out a normally lit version. When you're comping to live action plates, this is especially important.

So, just a guess. Like I said, I haven't worked at these types of places before so I could be wrong, but it makes sense.

And the way I did it was to create three solid color layers in AE (one light color, one dark color, and one mid-tone color) and then use a "Set Matte" filter to point to the R, G, or B channel of the footage.

[Daniel-B]

What are the best angles to put the lights in Max to render an RGB pass like this? I suppose you have to have a general direction in mind, and can't render a color pass that will allow you to light from ANY angle. Right?

[jussing]

What are the best angles to put the lights in Max to render an RGB pass like this? I suppose you have to have a general direction in mind, and can't render a color pass that will allow you to light from ANY angle. Right?Exactly. Or, three general directions, one per color. :)

You light your subject from three angles you prefer, such as a keylight (for instance, the sun), a backlight (to bring out the halo of the smoke), and the third light might for instance be a fill light, to bring out more detail in the smoke.

Then you render those in one pass, split them, and adjust them individually. And I agree with JHaywood, it's more of an adjustment than a relighting. And his "set matte" sounds easier than the "set channels" approach I've been using.

- Jonas

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

In Combustion you can use Set Matte the same way, 3 Solids Set Matte based on Red, Green, and Blue. If you want to relight it you can add a CC Color Wheel and adjust the Hue Shift. This will rotate the values around allowing you to change the position of the light/mid/dark values. I just tried this and it worked great.

-Eric

[SoLiTuDe]

So the reason you'd want to seperate the smoke into RGB components is more to have complete control over the colors and light values. With this setup you can do more to fine tune the look than if you just rendered out a normally lit version. When you're comping to live action plates, this is especially important.



Why you gotta go and be all smart, huh? :) That's a great way of explaining it, and thanks for the "set matte" tips. I'll be def be playing with it for the next hour or so.

--Did you guys end up using this on any of my shots? I'd love to see it next time I'm up there anyway if you're available. :)

[JHaywood]

--Did you guys end up using this on any of my shots? I'd love to see it next time I'm up there anyway if you're available. :)

No, I had to make some background smoke for a bunch of shots. That's another trick, I made one column of smoke slowly rising, made sure the animation length was way longer than I needed, and then duped it around the scene, offsetting the animation so they weren't all perfectly synched. I also scaled and adjusted the coloring for more variation, but it's still just one long set of frames.

BTW, check your PM.

[jussing]

.....what shots are we talking about here, guys? Something you want to share? :)

Cheers,
- Jonas

[JHaywood]

Nothing I can share quite yet, sorry.

[Matt^]

Wow great information going on here! Thats a really useful tip about the colour channels.
Just tried a test in combustion and worked a treat. :thumbsup:

One question i have though is; do you have to render out a separate beauty pass when you want coloured smoke? The tri-colour pass for lighting tweaks works fine if you want monochrome smoke, or even colour correcting it to an overall colour. But i'm finding it difficult to colour shift the separate channels to match my original render (yellow key/blue fill/purple rim).

Maybe i'm just not tweaking it enough in combustion? :shrug:

[rebolt]

Thanks alot guys. Now i am gonna go and try this with combustion. But its quite a good way to show your breakdowns.

[SoLiTuDe]

BTW, check your PM.

:) Checked and pm'd back.

If you guys look at Jhaywood's name/profile... you'll see where he works, and then you can prob figure out what project he's probably working on. The specifics within that are what we can't discuss yet though. :)

[amckay]

glad to see these posts are still going on, been too distracted to post much lately


lots of great info here in, keep up the great work guys!
I just came back from back to back conferences for Game developers conference in Brisbane, AU and Digital Media Festival in Sydney, so I spoke at both about game cinematics and vfx, bit on superman returns as well. I'm probably going to attend GDC in LA in March if anyone's going?

[Glacierise]

Allan! Very glad to see ya, man! Please, tell us a bit about FumeFX in Superman returns! What was it like? It was used in the airplane scene, wasn't it? Great shot, btw!

[SoLiTuDe]

Allan! Very glad to see ya, man! Please, tell us a bit about FumeFX in Superman returns! What was it like? It was used in the airplane scene, wasn't it? Great shot, btw!

I think Sony did the airplane shot -- with Houdini most likely. Fume was used for the bullet shot into superman's eye though. (see first link)

http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6571 <-- good stuff
http://www.fxguide.com/article360.html <-- more good stuff

Edit: One more for ya: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=498&Itemid=68 :)

[Glacierise]

Wow, thanks! Nice reads! Turns out this movie was even more of a monster poject than i thought!

[rebolt]

Good to see you back allan on this forum. I am really a big fan of your work. Could you tell us what kind of shots you worked on superman returns and how diffucult it was to cope up with tight deadlines and effects driven shots ?

Thanks

[MiguelPerez]

It was used in the airplane scene, wasn't it? Great shot, btw!

I think that the airplane sequence was done with sprites, not with volumetrics :)

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

But i'm finding it difficult to colour shift the separate channels to match my original render (yellow key/blue fill/purple rim).I think part of your problem is your color choices. The reason you use Red, Green, and Blue is are primary colors. Yellow is a mix of Red and Green and purple is a mix of Red and Blue. Try using the primary colors to seperate out the lights better. Otherwise if you adjust the red channel you will effect the key and rim, but not the fill light, and if you change the blur channel you will effect the fill and rim, but not the key. Changing the green channel will partially effect the key color.

-Eric

[jussing]

I think that the airplane sequence was done with sprites, not with volumetrics :)The clouds were "generated by volumetric rendering techniques developed specifically for the production" (Cinefex 106, p. 87)

...though Houdini was also a great part of it:
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3644&page=3

More here:
http://vfxworld.com/?atype=articles&id=2934&page=4

- Jonas

[Matt^]

Hi Eric, thanks for your reply. :thumbsup:

I don't think i explained myself very clearly, either that or i'm misunderstanding you. I am using a red key, a blue fill and a green rim. But from this render i can't manage to colour correct it to the final look i want which is the (very subtle) yellow key, blue fill and purple rim.

Are you suggesting i use different coloured lights instead of rgb? Or did you think i was using yellow/blue/purple lights? :shrug:


Ta! :)

[yoni-cohen]

seperating RGB is mainly for the sake of compositing.
then you can take the 3 channels and use them as masks for dif ops.

what you did is right and you simply have to train yourself to think this way during the compositing sessions and you`d be able to get what you want!
Y

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

Or did you think i was using yellow/blue/purple lights? I thought you were using the yellow/blue/purple lights. To do this in your compositing package make a yellow, a blue, and a purple solid layer. Then use the image as a set matte for the different light types, for the yellow use the red channel, for the blue use the blue channel, and for the purple use the green channel. Now composite the solid layers together. This is the same technique as described by JHaywood, however you may want an alpha of the effect also, that way you can use it as with a black solid for the shadow areas.

-Eric

[3DKonglen]

Hey !

Im thinking about buying the Afterburn plugin for 3dsmax 9 , but I have a major question about it before i do so .. Does it work with Mental ray ? if not , wil it ever ? ( I use mental ray and i think most ppl do so to in max if not other renders , just not default scanline render.)

[Matt^]

Ahhh brilliant! Yeah i dig it now.

Thanks for the breakdown Eric, that works great! :thumbsup:

[Steve Green]

Hi,

no, Afterburn doesn't work with Mental Ray, which seems to be the least compatible (plugin-wise) of the renderers.

As for if it ever will, I did ask Kresimir about this, and he didn't say never, but he's got his hands full with FumeFX at the moment.

The solution at the moment is to render AB in another renderer and comp, but then you have problems with reflections/refractions, displacements and 3D motion blur if you're using those in your mr scene.

Cheers,

Steve

[mustan9]

I don't think AfterBurn is even out for 3D Studio Max 9.

I haven't heard, seen or even know of what is going on with AB for Max9. What's the story?

[Steve Green]

It's a holdup with the ACP/DCP installers rather than the recompile of the plugin itself.

- Steve

[Matt^]

Mentalray is so bloody picky. Why is it that it has the worst support for 3rd party plugins? Is it because it was native to softimage, or maya or wherever it originally came from, and therefore the max version is a recompile (of sorts)? Surely it can't have been re-written from the ground-up for max?

[Steve Green]

I imagine it's more because it is a cross-platform renderer, where Brazil, Vray etc. all started life in Max. So there would have been no support for max plugins on mental images part.

Max's native fire effect does work in mr though, so it looks like Autodesk put some effort into supporting Max atmospherics, but I don't know if it involved a change to mental ray or a change to the atmospheric itself.

Yes, it's annoying but it looks like mental ray for Max is getting more interest these days, so hopefully there might be more pressure to get the ACP plugins like Afterburn, Dreamscape (and presumably FumeFX) working with mental ray.

It would also make sense for studios who are using mental ray in different apps (say character animation in Maya and volumetrics in Max) for compositing purposes.

- Steve

[PiXeL_MoNKeY]

It is not that Mental Ray is picky, the problem comes from the fact that MR is an external renderer. The scene file gets translated from Max and sent to the renderer which exists outside Max. For 3rd party plugins to work properly with MR the 3rd party developer must create shaders and support for their plugin through the translation process. There have been comments from Kresmir that there will be a new version of AB and DS, and that MR support is one of the top requested features. So it is a matter of how much time and work it would take to develop the needed support for MR.

-Eric

[feldy]

most of the time i can get mental ray to render particles a lot faster. but if getting afterburn to support mental ray vs getting fume out the door i pick fume getting out the door first. But thats just me.

[loran]

Hi there,
have a look on the amazing works that guy do for his demoreel, especially the buggy sequence ! -> Peter Sanitra (http://www.psanitra.com/2006/?page_id=62)
http://laurent.renaud.free.fr/divers/petersanitra_buggy.jpg

My question:
Do you guys have special advices (I m sure you ll have )to work with multipass? I have never understand how to get a nice composite by separtating particles and geometry. Everything is so dependant with volumetrics...

[PsychoSilence]

so true loran! volumetrics with gemoetry is very tricky some times :( alot of matte/shadow tricks going on ;) or VRay properties if you use that renderer. splitting a scene up into passes is the key.

kind regards

anselm

[darkdreams]

Is there a tutorial or something about that?I'm interested in that too :scream:

[Glacierise]

Mattes are the way to go, definitely. I tried such a thing, and it worked, but it wasn't very complex.

[CapitanRed]

since i know the tchnique about afterburn and matte shadows, i render a lot more with default scanline.

in animations you mostly don't see the difference between vray, mentar ray or default scanline, as long as you have a good lightning setup.
sure, it's a lot easyer to simply apply GI and a Vray light, and render with vray...but it also works with default scanline.

one thing, when you split your renders:

render first the part without the volumentrics. then apply this renders into the environment slot. this way you won't have a color spill around the volumentrics edges.

and if you want to have the volumentrics reflected on your objects, which are rendered with GI, then use matte shadow material, and apply a raytrace map to the reflection slot.
this works for me very fine.

the only thing i still have problemes, is motion blur.
when you apply an image motion blur to objects, and then apply the same blur to the matte objects, the volumentrics look a bit weird.

id did a test which you can watch here:

www.megalomania.ch/capitanred/movies/building_explosion.wmv (http://www.megalomania.ch/capitanred/movies/building_explosion.wmv)

it's just a test...but looks ok in my mind :)

[darkdreams]

wow!!! it looks great, can you give me some tips about matte shadow and render particles apart?

[darkdreams]

The explosion looks reaaalllyyyy great!!! can you give me some tips about using matte shadow and afterburn? dont know a thing

[rebolt]

Hey CaptainRed the scene looks good specially the synchronization of the blasts with the falling debris and glass chunks and reflection also good. But i think if your camera is in bottom and facing upwards then if the explosion burst out and debris falls then it should struck with the camera to get more realism which is curently not. But all the way good scene.

[Massemannen]

Hey CaptainRed the scene looks good specially the synchronization of the blasts with the falling debris and glass chunks and reflection also good. But i think if your camera is in bottom and facing upwards then if the explosion burst out and debris falls then it should struck with the camera to get more realism which is curently not. But all the way good scene.

You miss the point!! Focus on the Afterburn part instead, not if debris bounce of the camera, stars in the background...

[CapitanRed]

rebolt:
you're right, there should be more camerashake, and bouncing and what else.
but as massemannen said, it's not the the focus.

I had two goals in this animation.
-to reflect the volumentrics in the building
-and rays which come out of the building, before it bursts.(this didn't work :p)

darkdreams:

you do not render matte shadows and AB apart. you render them together as one pass.
everywhere a matte object is, there will be transparent. only when something is between the camera an the matte object, then it wil be rendered.

this way, you can render first your objects with all materials.
than, apply to all this objects a matte/shadow material, put the renders from the first pass in the environment map, and render the afterburn pass.
then, composite the two passes together.

EDIT---

I forgot to say, that you have to check 'apply atmosphere' and 'at object depth' in the matte/shadow material.

[darkdreams]

thnks! Captain Red, now i got an idea of what to do :thumbsup:

[3DKonglen]

Hey

Im trying to create waves generated by a boat sailing in a large ocean, The problem I have is that I dont want to use geometry in the ocean , because my scene is already large enough. So im wondering if anyone knows how to do this maybe with Afterburn and partcles ?

Might that be a way to do it ? and if so does anyone know how a good way to do this ?

[SoLiTuDe]

afterburn isn't really meant for water or oceans for that matter -- using dreamscape would probably be your best bet. not using geometry is probably out of the question.

[jussing]

One way you can make the foam a boat leaves in the surface, is to model the whole "path" of waves, in their final shape at the end of the shot. Put it on top of the water geometry, as a decal.

Then you can collapse the vertices to an infinitely thin shape, and then morph from one to th other as the boat passes by. That's how I did the boat trail in the first shot in this demo reel (http://www.duck.dk/gallery/demoreel_august2005.html).

Then put your geometrical water animation (waves, noise, Reactor, displacement or whatever) on top of both the wave trail and the large water mesh.

Of course, the shot in my reel is supposed to look a bit cartoonish, but if you work on a more realistic and animated texture, I think it can look real.



Merry Christmas all!
- Jonas

[renochew]

One way you can make the foam a boat leaves in the surface, is to model the whole "path" of waves, in their final shape at the end of the shot. Put it on top of the water geometry, as a decal.

Then you can collapse the vertices to an infinitely thin shape, and then morph from one to th other as the boat passes by. That's how I did the boat trail in the first shot in this demo reel (http://www.duck.dk/gallery/demoreel_august2005.html).

Then put your geometrical water animation (waves, noise, Reactor, displacement or whatever) on top of both the wave trail and the large water mesh.

Of course, the shot in my reel is supposed to look a bit cartoonish, but if you work on a more realistic and animated texture, I think it can look real.



Merry Christmas all!
- Jonas

Hi Jussing, very great technique for the foam animation! But I don't quite understand the way you do it, can you give me some more description? Do you mean combine the foam and water into one geometry, and then animate them with displacement modifier? What do you mean to collapse the vertices to an infinitely thin shape?

Sorry for all those questions, but your works are really good and I do want to learn something from you.

- Reno

[3DKonglen]

Hey !

Solitude , Thanks for your reply , i know about Dreamscape and its pretty nifty , but I still wanna see if theres a way to go around all the geometry.

Jussing , The demo reel really shows what im kinda looking for, its pretty cool !
But as Renochew says its a bit difficault to understand what u mean, about "collapse the vertices to an infinitely thin shape" , I can see that modelling the waves and then morphing it on as the boats goes by , could be a nifty way to do it. then I would only need geometry on those waves not the whole sea mesh.

One more thing what do u mean to put the final shape on top of the water geometry as a "decal" ?

Since this is not a afterburn matter anymore I guess it shouldnt be discussed to much , but it would be cool if u explaned it a little bit more in detail.

Again thanks for the replyes !

[darkdreams]

mmm... maybe i'm not in the right forum since this is for afterburn, but I think in this page www.3dluvr.com (http://www.3dluvr.com) you could find a tutorial about what you're looking at!


Good Luck!!! :thumbsup:

[jussing]

@3DKonglen & renochew: Here's a picture to illustrate what I mean. By "decal", I mean a piece of geometry lying on top of the other geometry, like bullet holes in game-engines.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=95642

Cheers,
- Jonas

[renochew]

@3DKonglen & renochew: Here's a picture to illustrate what I mean. By "decal", I mean a piece of geometry lying on top of the other geometry, like bullet holes in game-engines.

(Sorry for keep on discussing water animation in this afterbrun thread)
Jussing, thanks for the response, I imagine that you need to animate the foam separately from the water surface, if it is the case, then how you synchronize the movement of the foam geometry and the water surface?

Renochew

[jussing]

how you synchronize the movement of the foam geometry and the water surface?By applying the same noise/wave/Reactor modifier to the two objects. :)

Good luck,
- Jonas

[SoLiTuDe]

(Sorry for keep on discussing water animation in this afterbrun thread)



I don't think any of us really care... besides it's just another thing for us to learn! :)

[darkdreams]

yep! And if we learn from jussing even better :scream:

[renochew]

By applying the same noise/wave/Reactor modifier to the two objects. :)


Jonas, thanks! I got your idea:thumbsup:. And I will try that out, hope I could have some result as good as yours.

[nitrocom]

Hi all,

I just sent a message just before to a wrong place in forum:)n Sorry for this...

Now heading for the real stuff, I was trying to achive a realistic fire. I used PF +AB.

In the end of animation everythig looks good, however beginning of the birth event the spheres become puffy ball and look unrealistic. I uploaded it, here is the link:

http://rapidshare.com/files/10762039/fire_test_002.mov.html (http://rapidshare.com/files/10762039/fire_test_002.mov.html)

(Sorry for rapid guys, ill fix it as soon as i can)

Well as you will see on the video, the fire begins bad and ends good.(realism) How can i fix the beginning of the animation. Is there another way to fix it or do I have to an another technic..

Well, when i first headed here i realised that i missed a good stuff, everyone who are fans of AB is here, lol :)

Well anyway more questions are on the way :)

[SoLiTuDe]

you should take a look at the noise settings... It looks like the noise has too high of a white value, so it's filling up the volumetric sphere to it's fullest almost. You should start by playing with the bias/gain and the high/low thresholds of the noise. With your preview turned on (in the noise shape parameters you'll probably be seeing a lot of white, you need to make it more gray, and then it shouldn't have such a sharp edge... turn on the density falloff too if you haven't already. Looks good so far!

[rebolt]

Hi well yeah what solitude mentioned is absolutely right. Try to play with the noise and other parameter like bias and threshold. But i think if you want to make fire afterburn is just not for that. Its good for explosions or smoke etc. Use Fumfx for that or use maya fluids those are the real to make realistic fire and flames.

[nitrocom]

Well thanx guys..

Actually ive never used fumefx or maya's advanced visuals, PF and AB are my favourites, ı made a fire effect with Pf and material but it was no good for a production use. I'm trying to achive to realism in AB and PF. But looks very hard to achive.

Ill try to play with noise settings i hope i can send you an another post so you can see the new version...

Thanks alot...

Cenk...

(Btw, Im new here, and here looks very quite for now:) it was very good in the end of 2006, it's just because of new year :) Anyway, here is great to improve the skills :) )

[Glacierise]

Hi man, welcome to the forum!

About your effect - you should make your sphere size smaller (much smaller) in the begining. Regretably, youll need more particles :) You can also decrease the regularity, to mask the spheres' edges and get rid of the ballyness (nice word, huh :D ). Another thing that is often overlooked are the rotation controls (right under the shape controls). These can make your spheres spin, which adds randomness and realism.

I wouldn't rule Afterburn out for creating fire. In fact, it is great for creating large fires, that I guess would take FumeFx ages to simulate. What afterburn is not so good at are small flames. But try to combine it with the fire as in Alan's tutorial (on his site) and you can get something quite decent :) Another favourite tactic of mine is using a metaball system to create tendrills (like pwrapper or blobmesh).

[gavinb]

Hi well yeah what solitude mentioned is absolutely right. Try to play with the noise and other parameter like bias and threshold. But i think if you want to make fire afterburn is just not for that. Its good for explosions or smoke etc. Use Fumfx for that or use maya fluids those are the real to make realistic fire and flames.

Hi, AB is very good at creating realistic fire, infact max itself without plugins is very good, just look at Deconstructing the Elements with 3ds max 6 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/024051954X/xenomorphic-20?creative=125581&camp=2321&link_code=as1) by the great Pete Draper or any of the video training dvds (or his website) by Allen Mckay and you'll see what you can do

[renochew]

Another favourite tactic of mine is using a metaball system to create tendrills (like pwrapper or blobmesh).

Hi Glacierise, you know, I always have problem of creating chaotic fire tendrill when using AB, but I never think of using metaball, can you elaborate a little bit about in which way metaball can help in this aspect?

Thanks!

[nitrocom]

My my my... :)

It is great to recieve so many answers... Thanks guys!

Well i ve just tried the things that you told me. It's better than the previous one(great :)

However i want to add more realism and i have to work on it, im sending the new video so u can see everybody:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjXADIwLdZs

Well, ı worked on some gain and size, it made it better, i will try to use a new adjustment on it like size and noise parameters. But so far, looks not bad...

I attached the scene so you can see the parameters clearly:
You may edit it and post to forum... It would be much better:)

[rebolt]

Till now i only used default scanline rendering plugin for rendering afterburn scenes. But i was wondering that what else plugin we can use while rendering and through which we can also make volumetric lightining scaterring through the afterburn shader lets say clouds ?

[DeKo-LT]

Till now i only used default scanline rendering plugin for rendering afterburn scenes. But i was wondering that what else plugin we can use while rendering and through which we can also make volumetric lightining scaterring through the afterburn shader lets say clouds ?

Official support is only for Final Render, but in most situation Afterburn works fine with Vray and Brazil too.
With Mental Ray isn't working at all :sad:

[nitrocom]

I havent tried yet but they have good results with FR. On the other hand im using vray with it... GI works very well with it :)

[rebolt]

Thanks Deko & Nitrocom. But while using vray or brazil does that make the rendering time higher ?

[nitrocom]

much higher:)

[Steve Green]

I'm not sure that is correct - in my experience it's quicker because you can undersample (especially if the effects is quite soft) which speeds things up.

- Steve

[rebolt]

But what is most preferebly to get realistic output ? I mean tweakings or something in output can also be done in compositing suites.

[Steve Green]

I can't honestly answer that one - maybe people who've used other renderers with Afterburn for specific reasons can say, I just tend to use them because it's quicker, and Brazil has some nice options for rendering out atmospherics passes.

- Steve

[nitrocom]

Well as a vray user, quality changes and passes can quickly make render longer. Especially GI settings... I have no info about brasil and other renderers however the quailty and time is much higher than scanline...

[darkdreams]

I was wondering... is there a way to make the renders of afterburn quickly like in vray with the irrandiance maps?

[nitrocom]

Hmm idont think so, before i left the work tonight i was rendering a basit light scene(ill send it to forum) with afterburn. With 320 200 res and it approximately took 5min to render just one frame :) The setting was very low... So i think there is no other way...

[rebolt]

How can we achieve this type of smoke effect with Afterburn? If we want to make thick plumes of gas blowing out of the volcano.

http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/6341/mountdoomtn2.jpg

[Glacierise]

First off, great picture!

On how to do that with AB - use high density, maybe 10-15, and you cuould try a high faloff, too. Illuminate with light at the mouth of the volcano, and it shouldn't be too hard. Just don't use omni lights with AB, it's slower.

[rebolt]

Picture is great obviously because its from LOTR. :) Density is fine but the main problem is of noise, what amount of noise one should give to achieve that type of indivisual noise with quite dense plumes.

[PsychoSilence]

use an explode demon to achieve the right kinda lighting. place an omni at the top of the vulcano with a smooth density fall of. set up a spray or superspray for the basic clouds...with a high divergence. for the falling cloud part i would suggest a very basic pflow with gravity and maybe an age test (to let the particles blow in the air first then they are forced to go down after a while) and a UDeflector. just don´t use the high poly vulcano but a low poly collision version to save some sim time...

kind regards

anselm

[nitrocom]

Well what i know about that is this is not a plugin made work. Its 2d and bit 3d and compositing (it stands in dylan cole's showreel) maybe we can ask it to dylan. And the questioner would forward the dylan's answer :)

[rebolt]

Its a mattepainting made by Dylan Cole for LOTR. What my main focus is how to achieve that puffs of smoke for volcano. Like with noise and density. I increased the density but still i am not getting that type of effect. :sad:

[Glacierise]

I'll take a shot at it maybe later today, too busy right now :(

[CapitanRed]

I see it people, the first AB chanllenge (Volacno) is coming up :D

no...just jockeing ;)

I have another question. I am actually doing a scene with AB, where big white smoke is coming out of a chminey. and then there is something flying fast trough the smoke.

now i want the smoke be affected by this something, and draged away a bit, and then change his motion back to his normal rising in the air.
I tried to achive this with collision, collision spawnings,spawnings, wind, pbombs...but allways my volumentrics started to rotate, or there were suddenly more density in them or what elese. it always looked very unreal.

so, did anybody did something like this allready, or does somebody has any idea how to do this?

my last try would be to do a new pflow, which emits some particles in the right direction. but i think this will also look weird.

[Glacierise]

void demon?