Does any one here know about afterburn (Allan i brought your dvd, so i know u have a good understanding of it) if so i really could use some feedback on any ideas for the bubbles i am getting in my scenes, tried a couple of things over the weekend like changing the falloff and stepsize etc but it doesnt seem to help, not sure what it could be. ANYONE :):banghead:
PS Good stuff franco
adding density falloff by radius to linear will help, because it will make the edge fade a little so they blend nicer. and also making sure that your noise isn’t fully white (second image) might be the issue. what it looks like to me is that your aburn sphere’s are too “puffy” so try adding a few more particles to that first pic and maybe change the aburn sphere size (bigger), and on the second one make the noise high and low a little more even (if changed) (not so white and full, as it will make the aburn sphere’s very… full and spherey) also change the noise size to be a bit bigger also
coo – good luck… i’m no pro, but that’s what it looks like to me, so I hope it works. If not, post some screens of your settings and/or post the scene and we can take a look
Hey SoLiTuD, thanks for the input.
Yeah, the lighting is a little screwy. Too yellow. I’m playing with the color and attenuation. I’ll animate this over time. I’ve got to study the footage more myself. I have to remember what Peter Draper said about time spent on modeling in his book Deconstructing the Elements, “90% studying and 10% modeling”. I’ll have to have that tattooed on my forehead.
I’m trying to break down the video in small sections and produce the same effect for each part. Hoping that when I put it all together it will resemble the real blast.
The dirt splatter on the top of the bunker:
I know I have too many rocks flying out. I’ll adjust that.
I increased the auto stretch on the velocity for the dirt coming out of the top of the bunker. I increase it to 70,(speed 26.). This gave the dirt a nice fast motion look to it but, it’s too uniform in shape. In the footage the dirt at the top spreads out in an uneven fashion, kind of a splatter. I’m not sure how to do that. I’ll try and play around with a space warp. Any suggestions?
The intial blast:
The explosion inside the bunker at the beginning is just a bright flash that travels up the dirt trail to the roof of the bunker. This is just after the bunker buster penetrates the roof and hits the ground inside.
I’m trying the Octane shader for all of the blast pieces. I’m supprised how little noise is at the begining of the explosion. If you look at the footage the intial blast is very smooth, no streching of particles either. Almost a solid mass. I had to increase the bias and decrease the noise levels to make the intial blast smooth. I’ve turn the density down to .08. I also had to set the variation in speed to a very low number, as all of the particles at this point are traveling close to the same speed.
For the background I just put a bitmap from the video on a plane. My terrain skills aren’t very good. That sounds like another thread coming soon!
Far from getting it right. I still need a lot of tweaking to do.
For the dirt splatter-- try playing with the variation/divergence settings of the birth/spawning (? however you have it set up) Also try adding a wind force with 0 strength and some turb so that it sprays out a little more randomly…?
cnn.com news today
“Large dust cloud heads to U.S.”
Is that you SoLiTuDe?
For the spatter I ended up creating two extra PFlow sources that point at 45 degrees up, facing away from each other. It seems I’ll have more control over the size, shape and direction of the splatter. There’s probably a better way, but this works. I’ll play around with the settings to get more of a solid dust look.
frankco
I have problem when render Afterburn animation scene with backburner(with 5 machines). I see flickering and puff’s dissapearing on some frames… :sad:. When i render same scene with 1 machine everything seems OK. I don’t know, maybe Afterburn animation must be render ONLY with one machine???
Plzz HELP! :sad:
zad check out that scion thing on my site
I used a mixture of really opaque afterburn with small noise size and also metaparticles to get bubbles to work. Bubbles are a bitch, everyone thinks you use sprites or spheres, they’re really lots of layers of layers of metaballs a lot of the time, layers I mean like sets so they’re not all one big mesh, so you get them crossing into eachother. Had to do heaps for a pilot for the new mcguyver tv series like three years ago… which obviously didn’t ever get picked up.
I’ll try and make an example sometime, but if you’re going to use metaparticles, use pwrapper from glu3d guys, blobmesh is dog slow. But Afterburn’s great too with hypermesh, just don’t expect to refract or you’ll kill your machine (volumetric refraction (!!) ).
-AM
RE: Bridge sequence, got a PM from someone asking me to reply to this, been killer busy lately… you still need feedback? Apparently my mates old boss had something to do with filming that sequence? Or so he says… got him looking over my shoulder saying his boss had something to dow ith the footage of that explosion… I have no idea what that monkey’s on about but anyway 
After going through all the settings in AB, i finally see what is happening(isnt that always
the way). the Dust looks fine in the light or out of the light(in the shadows) but when it crosses that threshold the bubbles appear. I am using AB raytrace shadows.
I will be trying to figure this out tonight so if anyone has any thoughts id like to try them.
Cheers:thumbsup:
Back again guys, did some testing and found that using AB Shadow maps got rid of the transparent bubbles.
So ill do some more tests to night to make sure it hasnt taken away any of my detail.
Im not sure why this would be, has any thoughts on why this is id luv to hear them.
Yipeee:thumbsup: :bounce:
I didn’t have any problems with it – only running 2 machines, but it worked fine. Make sure they’re all installed correctly/same version? Contact sitni sati/afterworks and see what they say on their forum maybe?
Make sure you have the patch for 3.1 or are running 3.2
3.1 had an issue with some random noise generation when used in conjunction with Pflow rendering across a network, which results in this flickering problem. Kresimir has a patch for 3.1, and the issue was resolved with 3.2
G
A big Thanks, guys, i will check versions and try again! 
Is the a difference when use ‘normal’ NET rendering or render with a “split scanline” option?
flickering i have on ‘normal’… Now i try with a “split scanline”…
Anyway thanks! 
Thanks sadghost!
I got to play with AB this weekend.
I’m working just on the top splatter, playing around with coloring, bias, gain and different approches to re-creating it. I found the splatter, let alone the rest of the explosion, to be a very complicated mess and enough to keep me busy. Any comments or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
frankco
WELL THE DIRT MOVEMENT LOOKS great to me, it seems that there’s a little bit more darker gray on the original footage… but yours looks good…are you trying to replicate the original picture exactly …? yours looks good . may be a little too much uniformity in the way it flows outward…
And also I think that I see a little bit of red on the original first penetration being that it pierced a hole …it seems that a red flash from the explosion reflected a little on the dirt.
black smoke might be a little too thick… but I like how your first explosion looks…
i came across a problem with AB trying to simulate fog, the render come out great, exactly how i wanted it but towards the end of the animation there is this 2o frames of contrasty(picture attached) fog. i have fixed the problem by just playing with the setting but i would really like to understand why this is happeing. So if anyone has thoughts on why this is happening id luv to hear them.
Cheers guys hope ya having fun