Afterburn

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Hi，nice work，I have made a same scene like you I have some question to ask you ,I want to know the smoke on the ground which shader did you use?I uesd a lot of particles to flow the ground ,I try the two AB shader which we used to ,but all of them waste my too much render time ,the scene have three lights ,I use the raytrace shadow ,I use Fr GI to render my scene.Maybe the main reason is the particle number,but if I reduce the number I am afraid I won’t have a continuous smoke motion.I want to know how did you do this?

Laird85, I’m sorry to say, but you are wrong in both cases. In the other thread it should be painfully obvious that it’s not his particles showing seeing as there’s only 3 big black dots in the entire effect.

These are render artifacts.

videofxuniverse, I’m getting the exact same artifacts when rendering out that scene in AB 4. I didn’t however get them in AB 3.2 so it’s safe to say that JohnnyRandom is correct.

not so fast…

ive tried both methods and am getting no results, definatly not the particles thing and have tried jrandoms method but got no joy…ab3.2 it is for me right now…

It is a confirmed bug and has been reported many times to the developer and they are working on a fix.

The solution is to use raymarcher as I said or use 3.2a with octane:)

What I mentioned previously is not a fix but the correct way to use the new AB shadow map (since there has been some confusion about this in the past), it does not however work correctly with the octane shader (it does with raymarcher). The old methodology was to always have the lights atmospheric shadows checked on for use with afterburn. This is no longer the case with the new AB shadowmap. You will notice that if you do happen to check atmospheric shadows on your light artifacting will become quite a bit worse.

I used to have ab 3.2 but upgraded to version 4 because of the conflict issue with dreamscape. Can i use both 4 and 3.2 or do i have to uninstal 4 and go back to 3.2

^You’ll have to uninstall 4.0 Although I haven’t tried it since max7 you can try just setting up a second max install in another folder ie 3dsMax7_2, don’t know though with these wonderful “smart” installers might not let you, but worth a shot.

I currently have max8 set with 3.2 and a few other legacy plugins, seems to work ok for me.

BTW that’s a nice looking setup you have going there

gotcha, its all making sense to me now

I am kind of new to afterburn, I was always afraid of particles effect because of long time rendering but it is not really long time, I really started to like that octane shader, it made my life easier. I will keep learning with it till they make a fix then by that time(hopefuly soon) I will use it in production.

Im starting with a vfx shot, where i make a ww3 scene in my city.
With a nuclear explosions , buildings collapsing etc.

Now im stuck with a thing, the way i should go, for the nuclear explosion afterburn might be good, but it is pretty static, fume fx is more dynamic, but can get thick mushroom like clouds yet.

Does anyone have experience with both, and can tell me how to achieve the best result in both, so i can have a look myself, i havent found optimal settings for both yet, so i dont know the possibilities yet, as good as some of you here maybe have.

Any tips, suggestions, links, all is welcome.

I’m currently making a nuclear explosion in Afterburn using Andy Murdcock’s nuke from Lots of Robots as a reference (mainly because I think his nuke looks pretty awesome and he nailed the look of it pretty good).

I can’t give you an estimate to when I’ll have something to show you, but I think Andy Murdock’s LOR volume 2 dvd only costs about $15. It includes, among other things, the nuke with scene files and a small tutorial. It’s a great example of what kind of nuke you can achieve with Afterburn.

I, personally, think you would need quite the system to make a convincing nuke in FumeFX. This is because the only difference between the mushroom cloud of a nuke and that of a small scale explosion is the massive sense of scale. To achieve that you would need tons of detail in the mushroom cloud which means incredibly tiny spacing in your simulation. This would in term require a beast of a machine. That’s kind of the price to pay for fluid dynamics.

Also, I don’t think that fluid dynamics is all that important with a nuke. The blast wave, shock wave, bright flash, sound etc. are the most important factors and for those I would use neither fume nor Afterburn, but different tricks in 3ds max and After Effects (or any other 3d package or compositing app you use).

For the mushroom cloud itself Murdock’s way of using an animated mesh is perfect. It takes away all randomness of trying to simulate it with space warps etc. and leaves you with perfect control of the shape of it. This goes for both fumeFX and Afterburn.

Then you would stick particles to your mesh and use those with Afterburn. With FumeFX you could use the mesh itself or stick particles to it, I’m not sure what would look best or even work.

A combination of both would probably give the best result, but I haven’t got FumeFX, I have only tried it so I’m going all Afterburn. Also I hate render times and when you throw extra long simulation times into the mix FumeFX is not for me.

You hate long renders - man is your life gonna be hard with AB now Have in mind that Mr. Murdock is a master artist, so not everybody could easily get his results. On the detail problem - yeah that’s an issue, but don’t forget that you can make a low-res fume sim that can drive AB particles, so you can get best of both worlds. You can also layer FFX grids (I’m doing that in my tut), and, well, there are many approaches, right? Let’s make a nuking party, the more - the merrier

Using fume to drive AB sounds pretty clever.

However I don’t understand what you mean with my life being hard with AB. I’ve used AB for quite some time now and the thing I love about it is the speed.

But it’ll be fun to see what you come up with. If it’s anything like your protoss vs wall shot then it’ll be awesome.

Have in mind that Mr. Murdock is a master artist, so not everybody could easily get his results.

I’m positive Murdock’s skills are superior to mine in every aspect of 3d, but when it comes to explosions I should at least be able to get something up his alley. I’ve learned from Pete Draper that research is key to any effect and as I consider myself a nuke nut I have done my fair share of research over the years.

Had some time to work on my AB nuke and came to a point where I thought a test render was in order.

Andy Murdock’s way of using a mesh for the shape is brilliant so I adopted that for my own nuke as well. It gives me total control of the shape at every frame in the animation which I find great.

I still need to create a shock wave and some dust (gonna be hard when AB 4 is not letting me use the octane shader), and maybe a proper scene for the thing, but I think it’s starting to look pretty good.

I also need to learn some compositing so I can composite the scanline rendered nuke on a MR rendered scene or maybe even some stock footage. As you can tell I tried compositing the nuke ontop of the scene in After Effects, but I got this fringe around the edge which I couldn’t remove.

Dude, the test looks awesome! Can’t wait too see this finished.

That is a tip-top test render, great colors

I have a problem regarding particle flow speed.

Murdock uses the shape mark operator to lock the particles of his shockwave to the terrain. This method is fairly slow, but it’s acceptable. I would use this method myself, however I want the particles in my shockwave to move, both outwards and back towards the center, after they’ve been spawned and I’m not able to do that with the shape mark.

So I used gravity and collision to lock them to the terrain and a negative spherical wind to suck them back it. It works great, except it is unbelievably slow. It can calculate for close to 30 mins for just a simple test frame.

The effect I’m trying to make involves the shockwave moving outwards kicking up dust as it travels. The dust will at first inherit some of the speed of the shockwave before gradually being sucked back towards the center by the backdraft/updraft created by the nuke itself.

I’ve heard talk about the lock/bond operator in Box #1 and I’m thinking that is what I need, but is it fast? If it’s not faster than my approch I won’t bother with it.

Also, can you think of any other “fast” ways of creating an effect like this?

Edit
Found the demo of Box #1 and the lock/bond operator is insanely fast at giving me the same effect as the shape mark, but I’m unable to move the particles with wind or similar while they’re “locked”.

Am I doing something wrong, is it disabled in the demo or just not possible?

Todays testrender turned out better than expected. A more intimidating angle this time.

May do a test animation tomorrow while I’m at work.

Very nice. Looks really good. How did you do that cloud under the main mushroom? I’m not talking about on the ground, but the one directly under the top mushroom. It looks really good.

It’s just a clone of the top one.

The stem of the mushroom is a spline with lathe, displace and some other modifiers. And the top, the bottom and the middle are toruses, with displacements and FFD modifiers.

To put particles on it I use sticky particles that come with Afterburn. To get color I’m using omni lights inside the toruses.

All credit goes to Andy Murdock for this. I wouldn’t have thought about doing it this way if it wasn’t for his Lots of Robots tutorials.

My next step will be the shockwave and quite a bit of tweaking and optimizing of the AB shaders. But first I may go about creating a simple scene.