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ArtZone Heading
Afterburn: Quick Clouds
Added on: Mon Jul 09 2001
Page: 2 

Introduction

This is just a quick one I'm roughing out, the topics of explosions and clouds, and Afterburn in general I plan to write some fairly in-depth tutorials about but here's just a quicky on how to make a basic scene with CG clouds in it. Also this is more of an intermediate tutorial, I'm not really planning on explaining where the lights are or how to go to the environment panel this time around (sorry).


Particle System and Basic Setup

Particles: To start out go to the particle system area and create a pcloud system. My particle system's dimensions are 104.00-192.00-23.00. I also set the use rate to 25, so it emits 25 particles. That was pretty much it for the actual particle system, the rest is done within afterburn and through lights.

Lights: Next up I created a spot light, and set it to emit light from behind the particle system, you can have a look at the image below which shows the set up of the pcloud and light from the top and side viewports (ignore the camera you can either put one in or just use perspective).

The reason I put the light behind was mainly to illuminate the edges of the cloud and have shadow over the rest of the system, this is kind of as the suns setting (although I'm not going to use any sunset colour scheme but you're more than welcome to).

Once you've created the light, go to the modify parameters and go down to shadow parameters. Click on the on check box to turn shadows on and make the shadow type AB raytrace shadows. This is so the light casts shadows so it can create shadow around the areas of the cloud that aren't illuminated, thus giving it more depth and realism.

Making it AB raytraced is so that it's raytraced meaning its faster to calculate as well as more accurate (although shadow map is faster it takes a while to calculate the shadow map depending on how higher resolution the shadow map is, so lets just use rayrace).





 
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