hey all started using afterburn a week ago and wanted to ask if anyone knows what plugin is good for easy particles movmeant, cause i just cant get around with particle flow. it seems soo hard to understand especially when english isnt my native tong.
anyway i done a 2 seconds blow(by a tutorial i found ) it looks preety good but i just wish i could control more at the particles:shrug:. sooo here it is:
http://www.sendmefile.com/00212796
ziv121 - There are not too many particle plugins out there anymore for max. If you want simpler, I would suggest the legacy particle systems (SuperSpray, PArray, Blizzard…). For the power you get in PFlow, it really isn’t so hard, there is just a pretty steep initial learning curve. Once you get over that it gets a lot easier.
They may be old, but I posted some explanations of how Particle Flow works on my site (that never gets updated).
I think Afterburn wins in the quality arena and speed is really a matter of understanding how to optimize settings. I still would chose Pyrocluster over AB if I was working with Thinking Particles. The integration between the two is a feature in itself.
Kresimir has a nack for optimization that’s for sure. Honestly with Pyrocluster 3’s rewrite Edwin did add in a lot of new gui stuff and to an extent copied a majority of AB’s interface, at least the bits that worked etc. So they do stand as being quite similiar nowadays. I personally take preference to Afterburn, purely as there’s support there if I ever need it, whereas Cebas has a long history of being good at releasing products and giving no real technical support at all. Turbosquids tried to cusion that by stepping in and taking the reigns on the sales part, although still if it has a cebas stamp I kind of shon away from it unless absolutely necessary.
AB’s fast and easy to use, and more importantly it’s industry supported, those are three selling points that I think speak for themselves.
btw great to see you back on the forums Brandon
-Allan
does afterburn 3.2 contain after burn 3.1 or is needed to intal firt 3.2 and then 3.2?
Hey everyone.
Stupid question: what’s the best way to trigger multiple explosions in PF?
I have a complex system all set to go and I want it to explode on objext x at frame 001, object y at frame 005, and object z at frame 010. (I’m simplifying. There are way more than three explosions in the scene.)
Do I have to do a collision test for each explosion, or can I just say “trigger it here at this point in time”.
Just set the Birth op to Amount and then keyframe the value from 0 to how many you need “per second” then back down to zero.
Damn, so I gotta do it by hand for each one? Isn’t there a script or something where I can say “trigger the event at frames x, y, and z”? Cuz like I said, there are a bunch of explosions.
The easy way to approach this would be to put the explosion events as a spawn. So where a particle is spawned, an explosion kicks off. Then you can just put particles where you want with whatever timing you want - boom!
OK, so I make a particle system that emits one particle whenever I need to trigger? And I just move it to the correct locations, right?
Thanks man. I’m new to PF and Afterburn but it sure is useful and fun.
I am using MAX 7, AfterBurn. I needed to set up a scene to demonstrate a simple commercial product. I set up a particle flow, and everything looks great. It is a very basic fire with only a little amount of detail.
I was rendering the scene and noticed that the particles go completly black immediately after a certain amount of frames.
for example frame 240 is totally fine, looks great. Frame 241, particle go black.
Anyone know why this could happen? Particle life looks correct… and when i render without the lighting system the same problem still occurs, so I dont think its the lighting.
ATTACHED are the 2 examples of what I am trying to explain.
Hi psxchelly,
There are a couple of places to check for the life of the particles. In PF do you have a delete operator? And is Remove by Partical Age selected?
If so, Afterburn has a couple of settings to check. Set the particle life to the number of keyframes in your animation. On the AFC, for each effect, set it to PA for particle age.
That should do it. Let us know if you still have problems
frankco
yepp, I do have a delete operator. The delete “by particle age” is checked. The delete is set to 150 with a variation of 15… my problem occurs at frame 241.
When i change the Particle Life to the amount of frames in the animation, all of the particles turn fire color without smoke… when i set “by particle age” “life span” back to 150 the smoke at the top of the fire comes back.
All of my AFC are set to Particle Age.
I am still a bit confused if you can offer more help I would appreciate it.
Michelle
hey guys,
i just signed up on this forum now to post in the thread. hope some of you will come back and start talking again as i see you havent posted in a while.
nice thread so far- took an hour of solid reading to catch up on 2years of posts in it! lol
i just got afterburn, but am having alot of trouble finding good tutorials for it- eventough you guys kept saying there was loads of them out there. unforunately i cant afford the £118 for the cg academy afterburn masters dvd set, but will be buying the LOR one after reading bout it on here.
do any of you guys know where i can find a good smoke and fog tutorial? ive searched everywhere on the net for a couple of weeks with no luck, and could really do with the help. unfortunately alan didnt make one on his site for either of them 
(and i actually got really bad renders when i tried his cloud tutorial- which i think is down to me using max 8, thus different settings)
thanks alot, and hope some people kick life back into this thread! 
Welcome to afterburn central – 2 months of a dead thread has now come back to life… =) I’ll try and see what we can do to get this thread rolling again. I know they’re all relatively expensive… I bought the Szymon Masiak dvd from turbosquid
and it was worth every cent. Save up and buy it! He goes into afterburn almost exclusively, and it’s excellent! The allan mckay dvd from turbosquid gave me a real good intro to afterburn, but szymon really goes more into afterburn, even though he talks funnier than allan.
I’ve found out that using say, omni lights is probably the biggest thing for it… using it to actually light up an explosion, and almost forgetting about the color gradients works really will in most cases… of course depending on what it is the color gradients are still needed, but look into using an omni with “use” checked for far attenuation (which you can animate), and set the multiplier to like 5 (which you can animate), and the color to red or something for fire… and then of course add the xplode daemon which is kind of a pain to get used to, but it’s cool, and use torus’ with locked particles with the the torus’ rotation parameter animated… i’ll post an example maybe in a little bit… =)
Congrats Feldy! 2 years! WOOT! 
Edit: http://www.innersolitude.com/afterburn_rollingfire2.mov
lol sorry it was like 2:30 in the morning, so 15 pages seemed like 2 years to me lol
which of the turbo squid one better for the money or the LOR one then do you say? can afford to buy one of them, so which should i get?
basically i want the most advanced one out of them, i can do the basics
HEHE not two years someone said this thread was here for two years it was just stated last year
that dvd was good huh it looked the same as allans thats why i never got it i bought allans turbo squid dvd as well as all 3 cg master dvds but this one goes that much more into it? IVE BEEN WAITING FOREVER FOR ALLANS NEW DVD COUGH COUGH IT SEEMS LIKE THAT WAS VAPOR WARE. its going to be way over a year old by thetime it ever gets released.