Smoke

In this tutorial we are going to take a look at a method of creating some smoke using a particle system called a super spray, motion blur, custom textures, and a camera effect glow.

To start, open up a new scene in 3DS Max and on the create tab, open the drop down menu and select Particle Systems.I have given myself 300 frames to work with.

Once at the particle system create menu, find the one that says super spray.

Click it and then move to your top viewport and click and drag to create the super spray in your scene.

The icon looks like an orange arrow, pointing in the direction your particles will initially travel. To see this, scrub back and forth on the timeline and you will see the tick marks for the particles at their default.

Head over to your Modify tab with your super spray selected and we'll start out with the first settings under Basic Parameters.

Give the first Spread here a very low value, notice how it moves the particles apart as you scrub back and forth along the timeline

Give the second one 180 so they can move further apart as they go.

Make your icon size large enough that you can see and select it.

Make sure Mesh is selected, and 100% of your particles are shown.

Then move into Particle Generation Settings:

Leave it set to 10 Use Rate for how many particles we get.

Reduce the speed 1.0 we want our smoke moving a little slower than the default.

Emitter start at -100 so that the particles are already on screenwhen our animation begins at 0.

Emitter Stop 300 to match our animation length.Life 100, give or take depending on how long you want your smoketrail to be alive.

I varied mine by 20% to give some differences and not have all the particles die at the same moment.

Size of 3.0 with a variation of 30% will give us some small and some large to work with

Make sure your Grow For Number is a pretty big one, I used 75.

Fade for can stay at 10 so they shrink quickly right before they die.

Particle Type next:

Make sure Standard Particles are selected here

Choose Facing from the types list.

We can leave the rest of our settings as is and they will be fine.

Lets create a bit of turbulence and resistance for our particles next.

On your create tab, find the Spacewarps button, and create a drag in your top view like below:

Make our Timing match that of our Particle System.

Change the X and Y axis % to 1.0

and a 0.5 in the Zaxis.

This will slow our particles down as they float away from the emitter and gives our particles that chaotic feeling of smoke as it drifts through the air.

Next, create a wind in your side viewport. Like this.

Then rotate your wind around so that it points from left to right and make it match mine in the perspective view here:

Then make your settings in the wind match mine on your Modify tab:

Strength at 0.01 a very low number, we don't want a hurricane.

Turbulence at 0.04 to make our smoke twirl about a bitFrequency at .25 and Scale at .04.

Feel free to play around with these settings later once we have bound the wind and drag to our particles until you get the look and movement that you like best.

Now let's bind our spacewarps to the particles using the Bind to Spacewarp button in the top left corner of 3DS Max.

With this button turned on, you can then click and drag from your wind, to your Super Spray and then let go of the mouse button. Both icons will flash white letting you know they are bound.

Your particles should also start obeying the wind and twirl and move about according to the settings on our wind.

Do the same thing for the drag, bind it to the Superspray.

Your faces should start moving from the emitter and swirling in the air obeying the drag and the wind, the smoke will twirl and swirl and slow and speed up and hopefully is looking a lot more like smoke.

You know, except for the fact that they are all squares. Let's take care of that next with a texture.

Open your material editor (M) and find an empty material slot.

Then in the Opacity section under Basic Parameters like below, click the channel box to add a map, and select Gradient Ramp from the list.

->

It should take you right into the gradient ramp settings, this is where we will smooth out those sharp edges of our current square faced particles. By making only the center visible and fuzzy like smoke particles might actually be.

By clicking anywhere in the current black to white gradient bar, you can add a tab like above. Double click the tabs to change the color of the gradient where that tab occurs. Make yours match mine above.

Be sure to select Radial from the gradient type under the gradient bar itself, and the interpolation can stay linear.

This will make it so that the texture is opaque in the center, and gradually go invisible towards the edges.

If you want your smoke to be fairly smooth like cigarette smoke you can leave it here, if you want to fuzz out the edges a bit more, then use the Noise: settings below the gradient.

I made mine look a bit more smoky with the settings above.

When you are finished, click the Go to Parent button to back out of the Gradient Ramp to the top menu of our texture.

The go to parent button takes you back to the main menu of the texture.

At the top of our texture menu, find the Shader Basic Parameters settings, and make sure to check the box labeled Face Map.

Your texture should look like mine now:

Just click and drag this over to your super spray and drop it on top to assign the texture.

You can now render your movie and you should end up with something like mine which you can view here:

animation.diclementi.com/smoke.html

The uses are endless!