how does one do tire smoke trails??

[Ollj]

And your platform is?

I think 3Dsmax can "create particles on colision" in the colision checkbox. Not sure if that was a plugin.

Trails?
There is a free 3dsmax4 plugin named "ghost trails" usefull for stuff lime "transparent ingame (Starwars laser)sword-swosh" or the spaceship-engine-trails of "Homeworld" and more but thats might not be perfect for tire-trails.

[LFShade]

Particle System. Facing particles, very small at first but increasing in size with age. Apply a white or light gray material, with a radial gradient in the opacity channel so that it is opaque in the center and fades of at the edges. Then put a noise map in the gradient's center color and tweak until it looks smoky and wispy. Blinn shading with 0 specularity/spec level will work best for the material. If you need the smoke to cast shadows you'll want to set your lights to cast raytraced shadows, but be aware that there might be issues with shadows depending on the lights' incident angle to the particles.

Or you could use a plugin like the free DustDevil (http://www.blur.com/Tech/zip/dustdevil.zip) from Blur. It makes pretty nice dust and smoke effects using Max particle systems, I think it's implemented as a render effect.

That should get you at least part of the way there. Setting up particle effects is usually game of experimenting; going through tweak-and-render cycles until the effect looks the way you want.

RH

<edit>
For rain, use a SuperSpray with tetra particle shapes and a water-like material applied. It only gets tricky if you need interaction between the rain and geometry (like drops in puddles, surfaces getting wet, that sort of thing).
</edit>

[halo]

or you can use afterburner which also attaches itself to max's particle systems...its just a case of picking the spray that performs the best :)

[LFShade]

Afterburn costs money. I was trying to suggest no-cost options, but if you've got the money to throw around you'll certainly get a lot of bang for your buck with Afterburn.


RH

[NotSoFro]

Thanks LFShade

That was a really detailed mini-tutorial. I think that it will be of really good use to me.

As a suggestion for keeping the burn out smoke coming out of the right area, would attaching the particle system to a dummy object near the tyres help solve this problem???

[halo]

should do...be aware that some of max's pfx have bugs where they can under certain conditions spit particles out ahead of the emmiter, so you may need to move them around a little

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