INSIDE 3DS MAX® 7 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter 18. Particle Effects

By Sean Bonney

As we saw in the previous chapter, the particle capabilities in 3ds max 7 allow for an open-ended customization of particle behaviors. Creating a school of flying fish, for example, that trail purple smoke and explode into a cloud of tiny fish clones is simply a matter of building the proper Particle Flow setup. But what if we want those fish to change color or reverse direction when they approach a boat that has a changing path? Or if we need that boat to lower its anchor when a particle fish jumps over it? We will explore these sorts of complex relationships in this chapter.

In these exercises, you will build on your Particle Flow skills to create a more elaborate set of effects centered on a biplane navigating a stormy sky, replete with lightning and pyrotechnic elements. The event-driven nature of Particle Flow will come much more heavily into play through the use of custom particle scripting, with particle events directing scene objects and scene interaction controlling particle generation. The particle systems created in this tutorial will be fairly elaborate, and they will require several strategies to manage the CPU overhead needed for their calculation and for keeping the scene manageable.

In this tutorial, you will explore the following:

• Trail effects

• Electrical effects

• Smoke and fire effects

• Branching geometrical particles

• Event-specific Video Post effects

• Scripting for event interaction and control

• Using non-event-driven particles for simple effects

• Managing complex scenes with particle caches

Let's begin by examining the scene and applying an initial effect.