Particles???

JZAcH

Alright.. so i need you guys to help me up with some stuff here.. Below is a screen shot from the movie "wrath of the titans"



what i want to know is.. the dust/cloud stuff in the background and that you see encircling the rocks.. I wanted to recreate the same stuff in UDK.

So is particles system what i am lookin for or is it something else?

Also I would like to know how to get such density into the cloud/dust volume..

JZAcH

I'm a little bit confused...

Saman

From what I've experienced so far the particles in games are mostly textured planes, some of these animated like smoke, fire and explosions(with tiled sequences in the image file). I'm not very familiar with UDK but in CE2 they had example file libraries which you could check out and play around with to see how they're made and so on.

cholden

A handful of different smoke/dust particles. Some could be smokey materials, other might be best as high rez flipcards. It's all pretty basic stuff there, just a LOT of it as movie rendering doesn't have to worry about games stuff like fillrate and overdraw.

I had to setup something similar for a realtime cinematic. Looked great, but nothing you'd want in an actual gameplay scenario.

JZAcH

hmmm...

JZAcH

so there aint a way other than scattering the particles on a huge scale?

Bibendum

Break down the scene into the different particle elements, then use maya fluidfx or the 3dsm equivalent to build particle setups to render out as flipbook animations, build your final effect in UDK.

Saman

@Bibendum: I'm curious, why would you want to do it in max and then in UDK again?

@JZAcH: If you look at the image you've linked you see that there are several different types of effects going on, not just one big scattered effect. There are the smaller ones running down from the bridge, other larger ones coming from the parts where the bridges appear to be breaking and then the larger ambient ones nearest and furthest from the camera. These are not all of them though, I'm just guessing from what I see on the picture. What I would do if I were you would be to go look for some tutorials on youtube and then look for example files of smoke and stuff in UDK. You can only learn so much from asking us, you need to go and look for yourself.

Bibendum

The point of using Maya/3DS Max particle systems is that you can get realistic particle effects in a flipbook animation that you can use for the UDK effect.

You're not making the same thing twice, say for example you want some kind of blazing inferno effect and you need two different flame flipbooks in different shapes. You'd use fluidfx to create that flipbook, then you'd build the actual realtime effect out of them.

Barbarian

That effect is not particles (the main effects at least). If using Maya you would use fluid effects. You would have to have the FumeFX plugin (or equivalent) for Max. You will also have to use fields to control the effects. There is no way to get sprites to render effects of that level. The lighting (and shadow) effects also point to fluid effects use.

I've made flame and smoke effects in Maya as well as particle and sprite effects. I've used particle effects to make rocks hitting objects break into smaller particles and then dust, but the clouds with opacity and self-shadowing can only be achieved with fluid effects. I'm not sure what compositing software was used.

Framestore is doing some of the matchmoving and compositing for the movie which leads me to think that Maya was used, as well as boujou, and possibly even RealFlow fluids and dynamic effects.

You won't be able to get a realtime effect that matches that level.

In answer to your question "Also I would like to know how to get such density into the cloud/dust volume . . ." you will have to tweak many attributes for the fluid. The fluid resolution required for the effect in that shot would probably take a prohibitively "long time" to render. There are many attributes that affect the final look (opacity graph settings, transparency, density, resolution, lighting, texture, damping, incandescence, and many more). They are probably using turbulence, vortex, air, gravity, and other fields as well as handling collisions.

crazyfingers

I'd use some very large plane - like objects and just pan a smokey cloud texture accross 'em. You could get some fading where the planes intersect with the castle using depth bias alpha, but you'd want to combine them with alphas or vertex coloring made to simply fade to black at the edges of these objects.

You could do some simple animation of the position and scale of these giant cloud objects with matinee in kismet to roll them forward and cause them to slowly gain in scale like smoke being released. Animate a float node for general opacity so it fades over time.

ericdigital

Closest thing I can think of is the massive smoke clouds in the opening level of modern warfare 2 when your walking down the street. From what I remember they just used massive planes exactly like crazyfingers described. (might of been the first mw)

Zpanzer

Barbarian wrote: »

That effect is not particles (the main effects at least). If using Maya you would use fluid effects. You would have to have the FumeFX plugin (or equivalent) for Max. You will also have to use fields to control the effects. There is no way to get sprites to render effects of that level. The lighting (and shadow) effects also point to fluid effects use.

I've made flame and smoke effects in Maya as well as particle and sprite effects. I've used particle effects to make rocks hitting objects break into smaller particles and then dust, but the clouds with opacity and self-shadowing can only be achieved with fluid effects. I'm not sure what compositing software was used.

Framestore is doing some of the matchmoving and compositing for the movie which leads me to think that Maya was used, as well as boujou, and possibly even RealFlow fluids and dynamic effects.

You won't be able to get a realtime effect that matches that level.

In answer to your question "Also I would like to know how to get such density into the cloud/dust volume . . ." you will have to tweak many attributes for the fluid. The fluid resolution required for the effect in that shot would probably take a prohibitively "long time" to render. There are many attributes that affect the final look (opacity graph settings, transparency, density, resolution, lighting, texture, damping, incandescence, and many more). They are probably using turbulence, vortex, air, gravity, and other fields as well as handling collisions.

Well, techically using flipbooks and animated textures, you could be able to get everything you do in a offline renderer in realtime, as long as the camera matches up, however, it's most likely that the render you see there is a large scale fluid sim rendered with either a standard render or an optimized particle render like Krakatoa for 3ds max.

As for fluid sims, if you get into it, prepare to be very patient. Fluidsims is nearly as hardcore as it gets when you are talking about simulation and render time. Also prepare some large harddrives(preferably in raid in order to increase simulation and render perfomance).. Small high quality explosions / dust clouds can easily take up 500-600 gb of space.

Barbarian

"Fluidsims is nearly as hardcore as it gets when you are talking about simulation and render time. Also prepare some large harddrives(preferably in raid in order to increase simulation and render perfomance).. Small high quality explosions / dust clouds can easily take up 500-600 gb of space. "

Definitely, my last particle effects (for about 30 seconds of"spell effects" in a scene) had a cache totaling over 12GB.

I did test a flame thower fluid effect rendered in high quality in realtime with animated textures, but the drop in overall quality was noticeable (but it still looked good).

Eric Chadwick

COD2 did a great job with their smoke grenade. It worked well from afar, but also for traveling thru the cloud. If you don't have it you can get the demo to play with the effect and dissect what they did.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpVCgI0wbUw"]Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 - Smoke Screen Confusion - YouTube[/ame]

Alberto Rdrgz

^dood had me rolling!

"that's classic right there, that's classic. Ah-ha-HA!"