Source Effects?

IchII3D

I was wondering if I could pick the brain of any effect artists that might want to share some knowledge?

The main question I have is obtaining quality source material, as a texture artist you generally use cgtextures or hand paint, is their a similar library for explosions and fire effects?

Don't get me wrong, I would love to green screen my own high ordinance, but its a little out of reach currently :P

Thanks for your time.

slipsius

there are DVDs you can buy with footage. www.videocopilot.net has some great stuff, as well as some killer tutorials (free, and purchasable).

although, im not sure how that translates to video games.

PixelMasher

I know a lot of people create multiple frame explosions and textures for smoke and fx using max particles or maya fluids etc and then apply that to particles as textures in games.

leilei

Blender recently started having that smoke simulation stuff, which can apply to generation of explosions and fire as well, for texture rendering.

IchII3D

Awesome, thanks a lot guys. Think I will get myself a copy of Action Essentials 2, seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. Its not to bad layering stuff on top to create the texture side of things, but understanding the structure, speed and animation of different explosions is a dam pain.

ImSlightlyBored

Depends what I am doing
Stock footage is brilliant for speed but when I can i make textures from scratch - either by sims (smoke, fluid, etc.) or hand paint certain masks.
Stuff like transition maps, its really helpful to visualise what you are going to use it for, and most often I will model stuff in max to use (stuff such as height maps etc to provide transitions.)

Definitely recommend video copilot action essentials though.

Mark Dygert

From time to time I do some effects work, mostly rendering simulations to cards. These plugins are great at producing some amazing effects. They're all high end effects packages but that doesn't mean they can't be rendered and incorporated into games. The advantage of using simulations, is that you can often make them loop and fine tune their parameters to fit your needs.

FumeFX is a plug-in for 3dsmax, great for fire and smoke, did I say great I meant amazingly awesome.

PhyX and particles in standard max can pull off a hell of a lot of effects too.

Rayfire is also great, shoot, break, explode. Great for producing animated

Thinking Particles is like sprinkling a mountain of crack on the 3dsmax particle editor. Great at producing cracks which you can render to a plane to create an animated overlay, place that on any wall in game triggered by an event, great effect.

RealFlow is amazing at water and a bunch of other stuff. You can projection map a large body of realflow water onto a lower poly plane or mesh to get some great waterfall effects. For highly accurate collision of water around objects like waves around rocks, you can simulate water around the objects and render out the result.

Lee3dee

If you referring to FX in game, I'm working on Faxion Online MMO, so my textures are determined by what the spell is going to look like. I'm very limited to texture size and amount of on screen particles. I generally use Photoshop & Filter Forge for my texture creation.

Filter Forge
Its a great plugin for creating procedural textures. There are a ton of filters made by a huge community.
This is one I made for example, http://www.filterforge.com/filters/9423.html

I use Rayfire for personal projects. Its a great app!

Hope that answers your question