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View Full Version : How does AFTERBURN work?

jussing
04-15-2003, 04:11 PM
Hiya people!

Say, how does the smoke/fire plugin Afterburn work, anyway?

I've never used it, but from what I've seen it looks like it's "basically" "just" spherical particles emitting smaller spherical smoke particles, and then they spent a really long time setting up a good smoke shader, with proper translucent edges or something... (and of course some more advanced motion settings)... am I way off???

OH, one other thing: how does it hide the transitions between the particles?? -See, when I create an ordinary cloud of spheres, the transitions between the particles show up in the form of hundreds of nasty edges, giving away that it's just a lot of spheres put together... it looks kinda like intersecting ping-pong balls... but Afterburn clouds look soft and "puffy"... no hard edges between particles...

Any way to get rid of that?

One could play around with opacity, but if you set the opacity so low that you get rid of the edges, then to avoid the smoke being completely transparent, you'd have to raise the particle count to insane heights...

Suggestions, ideas, theories?

:shrug: :wavey:

Cheers!
- Jonas
jussing
04-16-2003, 07:51 AM
No theories?? :shrug:

Anyway, take a look at these pictures over from Wonderslime (http://www.wonderslime.com/main.html). (hope he doesn't mind me referencing his pictures...)

Heres an unrendered cloud particle:
http://www.wonderslime.com/tutorials/01-clouds/blobwire.gif

And the rendered one:
http://www.wonderslime.com/tutorials/01-clouds/blob.jpg

What is that...? Is it a facing particle with bump map and noise in the falloff parameter? Or is it 10-20 smoke spheres, magically blending into each other, hiding their intersections...?

Anyway, heres a small cloud of them:
http://www.wonderslime.com/tutorials/01-clouds/pcloud.jpg

And then of course, the kickass picture, in viewport and render:
http://www.wonderslime.com/tutorials/01-clouds/max-01.jpg
http://www.wonderslime.com/tutorials/01-clouds/render.jpg

Come one, doesn't anyone have any theories...?

Cheers! ;)
- Jonas
Arnage
04-16-2003, 08:20 AM
I wish it was just a trick, but afterburn uses hypervoxels for that effect which you can't make with max' standard stuff. You can get a kinda nice effect with sphere particles though, but never as good looking as hypervoxels. I've attached an old experiment with sphere particles as an example of what can be done with max without afterburn (please ignore the stupid spaceship :p)
jussing
04-16-2003, 09:39 AM
Hmmm..... hypervoxels, huh... :curious: gotta look into that...

Thanks!

Cheers,
- Jonas
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