pre-set Max

I manage to find a couple of pre-set particles for 3ds Max. Here are two which I've played around with, and I've been trying to change the effects to match that of a shock wave for Joe's film.

Robot Arm

For my match-moving project I needed to model the robotic arm, here is the turnaround of the final piece I will be putting in the live action scene. It's not as detailed as I want it to be, however it is only being used for the tests to get the hang of match-moving and compositing.

Night time

For my volcano scene I was thinking of maybe adding a night scene to it, here are a few stills of ideas I’ve rendered out so far.

Halo and explosions

This week I’ve had a go at creating a halo for the demon character in Joe’s film. I don’t quite know what it is he’s after, but any who here are some clips of some attempts I’ve done to see how easy it would be to create a certain effect.

 I've also been looking in to explosions for the film. However it’s not the explosion I'm having trouble with but getting the explosion to turn in to an implosion. I've tried to do it with just particles but couldn’t get the particles go back to the centre, however in Maya I could animate the fluid container but doesn't make the effect look believable. I'm going to keep trying and looking for any tutorials for implosions.

Trails

Here’s an image of something I’m working on for a friend, the character is to have trails as its weapons move. I’ve manage to do it quite quickly but have been having trouble rendering it, the particles won’t render without a shape operator, which then makes the render 4x as slow and most of the time will crash when it hits frame 2 in the sequence. This is a problem I’m trying to sort out at the moment and will update on here as soon I’ve overcome it.

I’ve managed to get a very small clip rendered out which shows the particles with a shape operator. I didn’t like the outcome, but at least I could see where the changes needed to be made. I’ll try and get the whole scene rendered out soon.

Let there be Light.

I've been having difficulty doing lightning; I’ve tried both in Max and Maya, where I found it’s easier to do in max but took me awhile to get it looking like lightning not rods shooting down. For the final one I’ll just have one bolt shooting down and speed it up.