Hot Lava :)

I finally manage to find a decent tutorial to do a lava fountain, it has a few kinks to sort out but here's a test I did earlier.

Final Maya Eruption test.

Here are some of the final tests I did for the eruption on my actual volcano model. I had some trouble getting the smoke to behave like it did for my earlier tests, the column of smoke when it rises was too stiff and box looking. It took a couple of tries to get similar to my previous tests; as I couldn't find out what was wrong with it I ended up starting over one or two times. In the end I got there :)  

Max Explodes!

I wanted to finalize the debris eruption in Max using my volcano model. At first I was having so much trouble trying to get it to render, I couldn't understand how I could render my previous tests which had bellowing smoke and debris fine, but the render kept crashing with the smoke taken off. Here is a short clip of my tries; the ones that are slightly longer are the ones that have rendered fully. 

The Sky so far

The render times for the skies are insane, one sequence took 29h 40"13 and others are along the same time frame as that, however with the quality it's giving me, I am happy to wait. Here is a short clip of the sky's I've rendered out so far, they are not in order or blended together, I will do that when all the sequences are rendered out.

Trees

These two images are tests to see which tree growth I preferred. I decided to go with the one below as it doesn't take as long to render as the one above, but also because you can see the ground a bit more, this will show the texture of the ground at the time, as it will change slightly.

Vue Clouds

Here are some test stills on the sky/clouds I'm working on for my scene. The scenes themselves are being rendered in three parts, one with just the sky and ground base, two is the sky and volcano and the final one is of the sky and trees. I've done it this way so I can change each one separately if it needs it.

Clouds

I've been trying to see if I could create realistic clouds that I would be happy to use. I did a quick test in Max and it didn't quite turn out like I thought it would, the image just looks like something that could have been done in Photoshop.

So from this I've decided to use Vue's cloud system as you can choose which cloud you want, animate it and add more cloud layers to it.

Vue break

I decided to go in to Vue to mess around  for a little break and this is the results.

Troubles with Real-Flow, Max to the rescue!

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted on here. My plan originally was to do an eruption in real-flow but I've been having trouble getting it to work, so instead I went back in to 3ds Max and tried to do a different type of eruption.
 Below is the test clip, it still needs a lot of work if I'm going to use it, for example the speed it shoots out as when I slow the speed down it doesn't shoot out as high its very low down which might work if I decide to have it more like a gargle. The main issue is to get the texture of it to look liquidly and generally more like lava.