HELP: Looking for photorealistic thruster tutorial! Any suggestions?
 

Hi all,

I have been looking through all the material here but haven't been able to find anything on what I am after. I am chasing tutorials on creating photorealistic missle thruster effects.

Can anyone point me toward a tutorial that is or touches on the subject? It is easy to say just use particle or just use voxels but I am actually looking for something that will help me with the realism so any suggestions would be great.

Preferrably for Maya!

Thanks much appreciated,
Nick.

www.tutorialized.com
there are 1 or two tuts on missile trails
hope it helps

Hey niickoz.

Other than the "Exploding Mig" video here at SM that I did a LOOONG time ago, we have no tutorials specific to what you are looking for.

Having said that, look at the image below.
This I did in Maya with a simple shader setup on SWclouds rendered out with Mental Ray.

If you would like I can slap together a small step-by-step in the next few days on how I did that.

that sort of thing is usually done in post, Shake , After Effects, one way is using a technique called 'displacement.'

one uses the RGB values of an image to push the pixels of another image

in after effects go to effect/displacement

in the effects panel go to/ displacement map layer

choose your displacement layer (the one you have already made using grey scale values, in your case i imagine it to be 'wave like'??)

horizontal and vertical displacement (you will see the in the effects panel of your displacement effect) will work with colours (when you look at it yu will know what i mean) but with a grey scale it makes no difference.

its simple, just play with that for a while

best i can do.., got to go!!

opps, i ve been shaped so i didnt see you are using fusion.., anyway.., its the same thing. there must be a displacement node in Fusion.., not sure whats it is called.., ill look

dum de dum

yep, there it is.., warp/displace

mess with that..,

no wonder i didnt see you were using Fusion, it wasnt you, rage beat me to the 'go' button LOL

time lag :)

and opps again, just woke, thought i read HEAT trails.., best i go back to bed.., stick with Rages plan :)

Wow, thats a really cool little Rage, if you could do a step by step that would be awesome, I can never get decent effects using just the SW clouds.

Chris

Sure, just gimme a few days to wrap up the work I'm doing and I'll upload the scene file with the shader as well.

rageMETEOR_DEMO scene file
 

Ok guys, I reduced my massive scene file for this shot down from 30 megs to 90k by just including the meteors and the associated shader.

Feel free to use/edit it to learn from.

The shot was portaying 2 meteors falling from the sky in front of a moving camera and smashing into a few buildings.

I basicly started off with 2 simple omni emitters parented to animated spheres.
I adjusted the emitters to only emit software cloud particles for about 3 seconds of life with a bit of variation.
The spheres had their Primary visibility off, as they were just used to animate the emitters.
I added one or two expressions on the particle shape to give some scale over time, and some death randomness.
(its been a while, so just check out the particle shape to see what I did:) )

The shader was based on a lava shader that I made that contains a 3d fractal and a Stucco node.
The For this scene I animated the X-translation of the 2 3dtexture placement nodes to give it some "seethe" or "convolve" to make it look like the fire-cloud was rolling and had a sense of thickness or volume.

Then quite simply, I rendered the trails in Mental Ray as separate passes, and in my compositor I adjusted the color a bit more and added a subtle animated VERY low noise displacement to the plates to give a little more sense of roll or convolve.

The color adjustments I made were pretty simple.
I adjusted the levels a bit to bring out the black/darker color.
I also sampled the red and oranges to overlay back on top of themselves to over-accent the dark colors giving more thickness to the trails themselves, and that also gave me more control over the bright red/orange gain so they wouldn't blow-out and seem too bright and "glowy".

Then I comped that all together overtop of the other plates and the natural life transparency Vramp in the shader allowed for a good blend with the shot.

Here is the scene file.
Feel free to ask any questions, but remember, your shots WILL be different, so you MUST remember that particles and dynamic simulations are usualy trial and error, so SAVE OFTEN and save MANY variations so you can go back to the beginning if need be:)

Good luck!

NOTE: This is a Maya 8.5 file:)

hey Rage, very nice, many thanks for the file and the explanation. nice site you sent us to before, especially if one is using fusion as their compositor, nice app, im trying to learn it. i just enrolled in 'advanced CGI and VFX' at one of the institutions here.., my 4 years at uni is over.., and left hanging i went looking for more knowledge.., this time in the CGI world rather than the 'film' world. Fusion is one of the apps we learn. :) nice co-incidence.

hey mirek im also looking for a course like that in australia where are you studying

Adelaide my friend.., but you are in luck. the other day i was looking at a 3D world mag in the news agent (dont buy them anymore, cant afford it and whats the point, its mainly Max and Cinema 4.., the industry news is worth a look) and it seems the only truly world wide accredited animation institution in Australia (according to 3D world) is in Melbourne. I had never heard of the place. you might know of it (sorry i forget the name), if not you might find some hide or hair of it ion the 3D world site?? the mag was only say.., two, three issues ago. Google it??

nothing like some real guidance. the course im doing is 2 years.., the teacher is a friend of mine (we have worked together before) and taught most of the guys in the more successful CGI production houses in Adelaide (and the world, China had been coming here a lot). im pretty excited, i know how you feel.., sometimes one just knows they have reached a point of critical mass!!

M:)

Im doing TAFE, 'advanced dip if CGI and VFX' .., maybe TAFE has that in Melbourne too?? but it's the teachers that count.., i figured that in uni :( some were less than hopeless.., actually taught bad habits.., like shooting SD with a HD cam (its OK but certainly limits what can be done, eh?!.., not good teaching method, but it gets worse with the teacher stories, horror stories.., long stories as usual)

if you are thinking of moving here you best enroll quick.., only a limited number of places and orientation starts next week

thanks heaps mirek thats awesome
im still doing uni this year in my 3rd year so it wouldnt be
untill next year that i head down their. so this lecturer you
say has a heap of industry contacts and stuff. and have you scene much of the vfx work coming out of the course
i would love to see like a student gallery i might run a bit of a search for it thanx for all the help greatly appreciated

Would it be possible to grab a copy of the fusion file, I have worked a little with fusion at uni but want to get more involved.

Many Thanks for tut

Chris

render out your frames in maya.., in Fusion, drop a 'loader node' into Fusion flow work space, a 'background node' and a 'merge node'

put the maya files into the loader node and your background, a back plate into the background node, to out put.., its 'output' in Shake, maybe its the 'saver node' in Fusion?? i think thats how its done. a straight composite!? watch your alpha though, there might be a gotcha there, cant remember but it rings a bell.

remeber to set your settings (frame rate, PAL or NTSC, ect) and save the Fusion file before importing or doing anything in fusion,

im very ignorant of Fusion so i cant really be sure of the above but it wont take you long to check.

Well, yes, and no. Its a bit different than shake, but the idea is still the same.

If you only had 3 layers or so to work with, then the loader>merge-over>loader/bg>saver would be fine.

In my case I had over 200 plates and about 4000 nodes total:)

The sample image above was just the flow for my displacement and streetlights macro testing.

Also, I could give you the flow to the main shot, but it wouldnt help you without the 12gigs of footage that goes along with it, too much custom work.

Now I "could" give you the flow for the above sample, thats only about 8 megs total.

Lemme see if I still have it, as I made a macro from that flow to put in my final flow, so I might have killed it.