Here is yet another awesome trailer for the upcoming game Star Wars: The Old Republic by BioWare. The makers of this beauty is – of course 
– my all time favourite studio; Blur Studio.
“The Battle of Alderaan. The Republic’s gravest hour. In the years before the signing of the Treaty of Coruscant, the Sith Empire sought to crush the Republic’s morale by destroying Alderaan. Check out one of the pivotal battles of this conflict in the second cinematic trailer created for E3 2010.”
- Blur Studio
May The Force be with you…
I always wanted to nuke a city… you know, CG wise! 
So I did a quick test with Particle Flow and Box#2 (PhysX) to figure out a way one could go about achieving such an effect. Anyway, here is a rough render with a simple city built out of lots and lots of boxes; 16,130 to be precise.
My viewport struggled to display all the boxes but PhysX had no problem calculating the physics for me, which was very nice. And I finally figured out how to use motion blur with Particle Flow, that’s been bugging me for quite some time until now.
Next step will be to build some houses and pre-fracture them and then use those instead of boxes, add some particles for dust and debris and of course a huge mushroom cloud…
Cheers!
During the production of Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic disaster film 2012 Autodesk’s 3ds Max was used extensively to create very impressive visual effects. Here are some screenshots I grabbed from a “Making of” video, were you can see 3ds Max on the artists’ monitors.
3ds Max with a dark UI colour, showing the ruins of Las Vegas in wireframe.
3ds Max on the left monitor.
3ds Max on the left monitor, with some fluid simulation it looks like(?)
3ds Max on the left monitor with black viewport colours.
Check out the video and read the article here: Special Review: 2012 Film. The Making of. HD Video
The company behind the VFX is Uncharted Territory, LLC.
A new plug-in for 3ds Max called volumeBreaker was used to smash buildings and roads to pieces.
volumeBreaker is a volumetric geometry fracturing tool that will instantly create sub-geometry within any mesh - geometry that perfectly fits together and fills any given volume. With volumeBreaker Cebas brings a Hollywood quality destruction tool to 3ds MAX. volumeBreaker was developed in consultation with, and to meet the very exacting demands of, VFX artists working on multi-million dollar movies – because of this, volumeBreaker truly is a production proven tool.
The tool is being developed by cebas VISUAL TECHNOLOGY Inc. and you can read more about it here: http://volumebreaker.com/index.php?pid=product&prd_id=77&feature=912
Now, ain’t that cool?
Cheers mates!
Big day today, I’ve just wrote my very first MAXScript ever! 
Its function is very straight forward; it allows you to quickly toggle between the standard grey and pitch black colour of all the viewports.
The black viewport makes it easier to see particles when working with Particle Flow and the standard grey is my preferred option when working with other stuff. So this is simply an easy way to toggle back and forth between workflow.
Installation
- Put the file in your 3ds Max Startup Script folder (e.g. “…\3ds max 2010\Scripts\Startup\”
- Start or restart 3ds Max
- Go to Customize -> Customize User Interface…
- In the Category drop-down list select Nanne’s Scripts
- Assign the script to a hotkey, a toolbar, a quad menu or a menu; it’s up to you
- Start toggling!
A special thanks goes to Marco “KIT” Brunetta over at Tech-Artists.org for helping me with some of the code 
Anyway, feel free to try it out. You can download it here: ViewportColourSwitch 0.1
Edit:
I’ve just added the script on ScriptSpot.com, so soon I will become famous, hehe Check it out here: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/nannes-viewportcolourswitch
Cheers mates, and don’t forget to comment!
This is just amazing! Probably the coolest use of particles I’ve ever seen… or something like that. Matthias Müller is the genius behind this and it is absolutely brilliant!
It is done in 3ds Max with Particle Flow and the following plug-ins; FumeFX from SitniSati, Particle Flow Tools: Box #3 Pro by Orbaz and renderd with Krakatoa from Prime Focus.
Check out some other cool stuff Müller has done here:
http://www.vimeo.com/user624589/videos
http://matthiasm.cgsociety.org/gallery/
One day I will be able to create awesome things like this, just you wait and see!
Cheers!
I played around with Reactor for breaking stuff. I used ProCutter for the pre-fracturing and it is a really cool tool! I also tested the script Fracture Voronoi and it works very good, but keep the number of pieces down to avoid crashes. However using ProCutter allows for more detail on the new inside geometry, but it is a little more labour behind it. Here is my result, captured directly from the viewport of 3ds max 2010.
Here is the tutorial that got me started; Reactor: Exploding an object part 1. It shows how to use ProCutter and Fracture in Reactor. Have fun and go nuts!
Cheers mates!
I had a go at fluids in Maya just to check it out. It was a lot of variables to play around with and I found it much more complicating then FumeFX for 3ds max.
I was impressed by the real-time preview in the viewport that was fairly accurate. And it was cool that you can have the simulation running while you alter the variables and see the changes immediately. However I’m guessing that this isn’t the case with heavier simulation, but still.
Here is the tutorial I used to get started http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/3d-art/how-to-create-an-awesome-fire-effect-using-maya-fluids/. It isn’t the best tutorial I’ve ever red, it got this “monkey see, monkey do” kind of approach. You are told to punch in different values in different fields without any explanation of what the numbers means, you kind of have to figure that part for your self. But still, it got me starting so have a go if you’d like.
Cheers mates!
I’ve been wondering for a long time what is the deal with ThinkingParticles and in what way(s) it is “better” then Particle Flow or other standard particle systems.
Well, the deal is that it is rule-based and not time- or event-driven. So the particles isn’t just controlled by their age or whether they collided with an object or not. You can design your own “rules” for how the particles should behave. Here is an explanation and a simple example for how ThinkingParticles can be used (quoted from the developers website):
Here’s an example why ThinkingParticles is superior to other particle solutions. Imagine that you have to create a 3d space scene and you need to animate a space ship flying through an asteroid field. This field is full of everything from the most enormous rocks to the most intricate pieces of debris, all of it hovering around. Now imagine that your boss says, “The spaceship should avoid the big rocks but the smaller ones are allowed to collide and bounce off the hull of the spaceship.” This would be an animator’s nightmare. An event-driven particle system would fail to handle this kind of task because you would need to define a path through the asteroid field and then look for the exact key frames where things should happen. But what happens when you need to change the path of the ship or the amount of rocks or the balance between the big and small rocks?
ThinkingParticles makes it easy to solve such a situation with ease. Two rules will solve the rock collision and avoid problems. Conceptually, the rules would look something like this:
If SPACE SHIP GETS NEAR (VALUE) A ROCK
CHECK IF
BIG (VALUE) ROCK THEN AVOID IT (move around)
SMALL (VALUE) ROCK IGNORE AND DO COLLISIONEND
Of course, the above is not the real code fragment. In ThinkingParticles, you do not need to type any code at all. This is only the logic flow diagram of the ThinkingParticles operators and conditions. As you can see, there is no TIME related variable in it so this will always work. Regardless of any path or amount of frames. Whenever the space ship gets near a rock the rules control its behavior.
But I also found this video presentation that gives a very good idea of what it can be used for—and it is mighty impressive I’m telling you! 
For more information check out Cebas.com
Ta-ta!
Cebas has developed a new fracture plug-in for 3ds max, called VolumeBreaker. It looks impressive.
From Cebas.com
After trying out FumeFX in my previous experiment, I got really curious about liquid simulation as well. So I had a go with glu3D by 3Daliens. glu3D is a fluid system but it is primarily used for simulating liquid substances; such as water, oil, honey, cement and more.
Rather then using voxels, such is the case with FumeFX, glu3D uses particles to simulate the flow of the substance and then uses a special surface generating algorithm for generating a mesh surface around the particles. Kind of like Meta balls, or BlobMesh as it is called in 3ds max, but from what I’ve seen glu3D is more stable and less memory intensive. Now without further ado, here is my first glu3D result:
I think it looks really good considering how easy it was to set up. Maybe the liquid’s viscosity is a little to high, it looks somewhat like some sort of liquid rubber, especially towards the end of the simulation. Probably should dial down the thickness.