Creating ground dust/sand

Danzigo

Hi guys,

So, I'm having a rocky, desert environment with a tank. I want there to be an ambient particle system of some sort to show dust in the air.

Also, some dust coming from the ground as the tank drives would be good too.

I don't have any plugins. Are there some useful tutorials anywhere I could use? Most of the ones I've found use fumfx or thinking particles.

Thanks alot.

Kurt Russell Fan Club

What package are you talking about? Is this animated, or stills? Do you want it to look like it could be made in a game engine, or just look awesome?

Danzigo

Sorry, I should've said this!

It's for 3Ds Max. It's not for any engine and it's an animation. I just want it to look as good as it can without plugins

I need to take the render time into account but I guess I can render the particles separately anyway and then put them in on a separate layer.

Thanks

Danzigo

Anyone able to help with this?

Eric Chadwick

Max comes with Particle Flow, and it's quite excellent.

Also immediately I thought of the multiplayer level Operation Firestorm in Battlefield 3. They do large light-volume ambient-animation dust clouds with simple billboards, worth a look.

keupon

Man, if that's for an animation, I seriously think you'd better consider doing it in post, compositing !!! Particle are too very slow to render and is hard ( not really hard but more long and tedious ) to learn. And too it will most likely turns out to be good looking in compositing than with particle system.

Maybe search for some AfterEffects / Nuke plugin for volumetric/dust effects, or good footage ( action essential or so ).

That's only my advice lots of way doing the same thing.

Danzigo

Thanks for the advice guys.

I'll look into doing it in post. The render time is something I'm always thinking about.

I've found this max tutorial:

http://cgcookie.com/max/2013/08/02/smoke-with-pflow/

You think this method will work for what I'm after?

Thanks again!

Eric Chadwick

You should be able to adapt this to make good dust fx.

Beware though, the noise controls in Gradient Ramp are not very robust, it may end up looking very procedural. If that happens, you could instead use a Composite map and layer a better noise pattern on top of your radial gradient. Look here for some better third-party procedurals:
http://maxplugins.de/max2012.php?search=noise&bit=96&sort=Author