Afterburn

crap… i just deleted all the stuff i said… and now i have to retype it… ugh… stupid mouse gestures and my stupid urge to click the mouse…

Step size determines the “resolution” of how many samples afterburn will actually take when looking into a volume… it looks at it like this |_ |_ |_ | and each | is a sample at say 1 foot or something… if you turn the size down it would do this: ||||| and therefore look better! (and bring render times up!) smaller step sized make stuff look softer, where bigger sizes make things look harsh. Falloff determines how long before a ray stops calculating or something like that… it explains this stuff really good in the pyrocluster manual… and in the afterburn manual it’s still understandable. =)

For the falloff to make it thin in the center I’m honestly not sure, short of taking the particles and actually making more of a funnel out of them so they have some empty space between them maybe? Use a vortex space warp if you arent yet… so they actually create a funnel. Then you should change the sphere size to match that kind of so that you actually have empty space in the middle. Right now it looks more like they’re just a line of particles…

Hope it helps!

ok i changed a few parameters
i have added a drag and reduced the density
what do you this is this looking better now
exp2

very nice! it’s a lot smoother now… some of the particles seem to go one way while some go the other way (left on top and bottom, but middle area goes right?) so i’d play with some of the noise parameters or particle motion… otherwise i think you’ve almost nailed it!

a little update (you’ll say it to me if I bored you)

hello everybody ,

i have a little question about afterburn…i m working on a tornado project and i have 3 systems of particles with 3 afterburn different…one for the tornado base…one for the dust around the tornado and one principal of the tornado ( and on with debris too)…i

my question is how i can recomposite my 4 pass…is there a way to do a sort of matte/shadow material on the afterburn sphere?! … have i to render it with z depth…if someone has a good trick…i dont want to render the 4 elements in just one pass

thanks …

ps: here is pics of the tornado…

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/psilo/tornade-frame104_.jpg

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/psilo/tornade-frame147_.jpg

ps2 : on the second pic i have a matt/shadow on the ground…and it works for the debris (poly) but not for the afterburn…if someone know why…

thans again

On your matte/shadow material, check the apply atmospherics button.

erf…i m so silly…thanks g8ff …

For those who are intersted, notice that there is a big bug between afterburn and the new hair and fur node in max. Unable to render the 2 effects at the same time. An error occured and max close…

I need some help to create a sandstorm for little animation am working on…

Am not very skilled with Afterburner, so i would appreciate a little walkthrough on how create a sandstorm…

Here is a little render of the scene

Thanks…

I’m not sure you have to use afterburn for a sandstorm, my guess would be to use lots and LOTS of particles… I’ve seen Alan mcKay do this in one of his promo’s so it can be done…

If you do want to use afterburn just use a lot of particles (again :P) and set de density very low… I guess a standard clouds tutorial should get you up to speed with afterburn (yep, another one of allan’s tutorials :P) and apply that to your sandstorm… But again, I’m not sure AB is the way to go.

It depends on the effect you’re going for. Wisps of sand off the surface is best done by birthing stationary particles on the surface, then spawning a flow of particles for a set time from these points. After a while, the particles die and new ones are formed. This creates random flurries of sand. This is one of the techniques I used for snow on “Day After Tomorrow” and you could do it with sand just as easily. You can make it very soft with lots of facing particles or you could use Afterburn with much fewer particles (probably render faster too).

I did some sandstorm R&D for “Flight of the Phoenix” way back when, and to make a giant Al Asad style wall of sand, I used an animated piece of geometry to randomly birth pariticles from.

gasp The Particle god brandon davis speaks! GASP hehe… haven’t heard much of you in a while… when you gonna update ur website!?
What kind of particle counts would you need to get a good sandstorm effect like that though? like millions? or hundreds of thousands?

heya guys, i cant help but think this issue has been raised b4, but i got AB 3.1… and i hav this scene with smoke slowly shifting around thru sublte turbulence as well as an animated phasei n AB… thing is… when i render out the 1000 frames, the rendered animation has a shocking jerk at every 300 frames or so, it destroyes the smoothness of the animation, in the viewport, the particles dont do this at all, its just that in the render it happens, really irritating.

anyway 2 get above this?
thnx in adv.

Ha! I passed the torch on to the new generation of MAX particle guys

I only recently returned from a year in Iraq, so I haven’t touched MAX in quite some time, with the exeption of a Lexus commercial. I’ve been working almost exclusively with Houdini these days on a project that goes well into next year. Aside from that, instead of spending my free time R&Ding new ideas, I prefer to skateboard and hangout with the woman. Maybe I’m over the hill; I dunno.

I’ll get around to the website some day; it’s just hasn’t been a priority to me in a long time. I’m sure I’ll get around to it again some day, but no time soon. There’s enough particle education stuff on that’s still relavent there and Alan and Chris can take care of the vast majority.

Okay, for the wisps of sand blowing, it would all depend on the size of your scene. Ideally you’d only want to birth particles within the camera frustum. The thing to remember with volumetrics is often less is more. With a big wall of sand you could use less than a thosand particles and just use large volumes. The wisps off the surface would be similar. In fact, sometimes you can get away with just a single particle that remains stationary. Just grow the volume over particle age, scale the noise with it (only slightly faster) and use a Wind Daemon to move all of the noise along a direction - it’ll give it the effect of blowing fog or sand.

For the AA090 shot in “Day,” it was mostly looking down on the snow at the two guys snowshoeing and it pulled back to reveal the city. Because of the angle, it was really easy to cheat the snow flurries with a couple different textures - no particles. Basically it was a series of noise maps masked by more noise maps, with phase moving through Z and the entire texture offsetting in the direction of the wind. Pretty easy but looks great; nice and subtle.

Hey, that was fun. Here’s a sample file of what I was talking about. I don’t have AB on my new machine, so that part’s not done, but this should at least give you something to start with.

MAX8 file, BTW

a year in Iraq — ewwwww. Glad ur back safe man. --Skateboarding and women are always a good combo! Evens out that nerd thing associated with computers… hence the reason I do my Dj thing (look at my avatar) Over the hill… i hope not… although I’m sure when this generation is like 60 years old we’ll have skate park retirement homes… but with more pads i’m sure.

Yeah – there’s lots of resources already… hence the reason i’ve learnt so much in the past few years. Of couse i never put my knowledge to real use… but I’m working on that. It’s still nice though to have a variety of people to learn from, more variety in workflow and such it’s kind of more interesting… find more ways to do stuff, ya know? Hence the reason you should play with max every day. How’s houdini compare??? (haven’t had even a remote chance of checking it out yet, though i’ve been meaning to) What’s it offer for volumetrics?

I know what you mean with less is more with volumetrics (afterburn)… using 1 big volume I can make some really interesting stuff. That’s what noise size is for. One thing i think a lot people forget (including myself) is that faking isn’t cheating… it just has to not look wierd and not be noticed as fake. …or I guess i could say that with this there is no cheating… it doesn’t have to be perfectly real and follow exact physics and whatnot (in most occasions) It just has to play the part and not have anybody ask twice… doesn’t matter how it gets done.

–Hope you hang out a bit more! do you have a messenger thing like aim or icq or whatever???

viztastic: I think i’ve had trouble with that bug too… i remember somebody correlating it to certain dialogs open (such as pflow) which doesn’t make a whole ton of sense, but save the file, reopen it (no dialogs open, except render…) and go straight to rendering and see what happens. Also… do image sequence if you’re not, so you can start it at frame 300 instead of starting all over if you’re not… also see if upgrading to 3.2 helps any. I’m not sure all what bugfixes were there, but if you can upgrade do it… can’t hurt! Do a search on this in the forums… i can’t remember where it was… maybe this thread even, about that bug.

hehe… nice snow flurries – i tried rendering them out with aburn, but it looks too much like steam to me… gotta work on that. Thanks!

Hi all, just came across this thread, I’d be glad to participate too

Here’s one of my better Afterburn animations: http://ic1.deviantart.com/fs8/f/2005/343/6/4/plane.mov

Sweet! We’ve got another! --the file says access foribidden tho! :sad: Anyway, welcome to the afterburn thread… hopefully we can learn from each other n stuff

Oh. I guess Deviantart doesn’t like direct linking. You can just go here then:

Tap “Download to Desktop” beneath the preview picture.

On the plus side, I didn’t really think of it, but you get a nice couple paragraphs of description My other work is there at my profile as well.