sorry this whole page popped up outa nowhere whilst I was in TP land 
yeah basically the material plays only half of the role, your shape also has a lot to do with it, as scale etc. also effects your shape so that has a role to play too.
everythings crucial as even lighting etc can change the way your materials react etc. etc.
Anyway on to another subject…i was trying to remake the ending on these 7up commercials
http://www.newtek-europe.com/uk/community/lightwave/partizan2/1.html
i know its not quite there…
any suggestions on materials and movement
here is what i did
http://www.jamaicafarewell.com/bubblestest3.mov
allen…the real general is here…
i got some questions about your scion TVC
http://www.allanmckay.com/toyota_scion.html
about the BG…was that a sphere with procedual texture mapped to it??
the same way you have that distant sky …or whatever you call it is the same thing i wanted to do with this BG
http://www.jamaicafarewell.com/download/Bg.jpg
just like how you got the boxes flying that’s how i have the balls in my animation moving around…along with the camera…but static BG:sad:
By the way i watch that commercial like 50 million times today…and i am still watching…:applause:
ohh man that was a long time ago back in my maya days
I believe … actually! I did that bit in max!
I believe I made an afterburn combustion node with a 3d procedural texture I built to control it’s density’s.
That was for the far background stuff, although I have no idea whether it was used. I’m not sure how I got the camera info into max, I might have just tried to mimic it, or mapped it onto camera planes, or something or wrote a script…
like I said not sure if that element made it in or not, but the rest of it was all maya pclouds, I painted multiple clusters of particles and set up a custom s/w pcloud shader I built, there might have been multiple layers (eg. far, close etc.) so the camera pulls through the patches and interacts with the objects.
the afterburn combustion aspect of it I’ve made a tut for on 3dluvr that covers it roughly, and there’s something very smiliar on my DVD which covers that technique a lot more indepth.
dude,i didn’t understand a damn thing you just said:sad: …but that’s ok…ur still the man:thumbsup: . Where is your DVD selling anyway?
sorry was in the middle of arguing with IT whilst writing that… basically in a nut shell I used afterburn combustion to create a nice nebula background, and it was used as the most background layer of atmosphere.
then the forground stuff was particle ‘puffs’, so it’s all atmospheric/volumetrics opposed to being mapped geometry on a sphere or anything.
not out yet, out verry soon though. apparently the publisher had problems converting 13 hours of video to DVD and building the UI for it as they’re used to 90 mins or something
Will hopefully be out within a week or so, although it’s been out of my hands for a while - so just waiting for the final tweaks on the UI of the DVD and it’ll be released.
I’ll make a post here for you guys as soon as I hear anything
Here is my animation…everyone please feel free to comment on how i can use particles to improve the visuals and the BG.
nice work! But remember what I said about compositing? Here it’ll play a huge role, throw some forground elements in, add glows, peak the highlights, soft defocus and other effects all add to make it a lot more glossy overall which can really work in this situation with a lot of colours etc.
definitely getting there though, great work
Ah, ok, for a rope, i’m guessing you mean a physiical non-magical kind of rope? Well for that particles aren’t really suitable, they would not hold together in a rope like manner and would be next to impossible to texture as a rope.
For ropes use Reactors dynamic soft bodies. Now if by rope you mean more of a streamer of light type of effect, then yes, particles could be used possibly.
As for rendering particles, shape, scale and material are the main paramaters that effect a rendered particle. OF course you can also use Afterburn, and in that case most of the render time controlls are moved over to ABs interface.
Also some third parties have written point renderers for Pflow that simply render AA’d pixels at each pflow particle screen position. These have been used to produce renders of several million particles. This is practical as no polygons are produced at rendertime, its more akin to a paint package putting a tiny dot at each particle point in an image. Using additive or subtractive transparency, you can get some pretty nifty results with this kind of system.
Hey Jmonkey, because those are not polygons, the render preparation process would take probably not soo long, right?
Where can I get (download) one of those for free?
Ok here we go. here is an example of what i think is particles. i found it on the web but can’t remember what site so check this link
http://www.jamaicafarewell.com/download/cgtalk/ultrahd.mov
I think they are using find target to get the movement…but u notice it’s emiting lines…that is what i ment by a solid object…i just used rope as a example.
how would you setup the flow to emit lines??
Jmonkey, chritter, allen , all
I think those were done in post, possibly with vectors or something.
To me they dont look like particles out of Pflow, although Ill stand to be corrected.
If you want to make something similar, add a spawn operator with the spawn rate set to a small travel distance.
I am still downloading the movie at the momment, so it could be that this answer doesnt create the effect u want.
What u also would create this effect is,
Draw a few splines as paths u’d like the lines to follow
create a few cilinders and add a ‘pathfollow’ modifier
Or u could even use a plane (with those lines as texture) instead of cilinders and add a pathfollow to that.
is it that Pflow cannot emit lines??..cus that the easiest way i see to do that, with a find target.
yes it can emit lines, but they wont bent allong the path, or u use some tricks or script it. It would be more work to setup than the methodes mentioned before. And it gives the same result.
A few posts back I seen someone post a file with the word “MAX” getting shot to bits. How would I do a similar effect like that. Anyone know of a tutorial?
