This week, Cgtuts+ has teamed up with our sister site Aetuts+ to bring you this awesome two part, in-depth tutorial from James Whiffin. Where you’ll learn how to create and composite a cool old school x-ray effect into some video footage, using Maya, PFTrack and After Effects! Head over to Aetuts+ for the conclusion of the project where you’ll composite the render passes from Maya, and use a variety of tools to make the footage look like it was shot in the 80′s!
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In this advanced level tutorial you’ll learn how to create a particle disintegration effect in 3d Studio Max using Thinking Particles and Krakatoa. While similar effects can be created using Particle Flow, Thinking Particles offers a robust node based system allowing you to truly fine tune your effects.
This tutorial covers setting up Standard and Dynamic groups in TP, and how to transfer particles between the two. We’ll also look at how we can map an image based texture to the the particles themselves and render the disintegration effect using the power of Krakatoa.
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Dynamics simulations can be a powerful tool when trying to generate realistic looking effects that would be very difficult to achieve manually. In this tutorial you will learn how to use nDynamics’ passive colliders and ncloth objects, in conjunction with fields like air and gravity, to easily simulate realistic dynamic objects such as a windy flag or a water container.
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Maya fluids gives you the tools to simulate any kind of smoke, fire, water, explosions, wind effects etc. and is a very powerful tool for every FX artist. The fluid simulations and shading can be as different as night and day, but they rely on the same attributes which you’ll better understand after completing this tutorial.
You’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.
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In this tutorial from author Chandan Kumar, you’ll learn how to make a ‘Skrek 2′ inspired forming particle text animation in 3d Studio Max. Chandan will show how quickly this type of effect can be achieved using the power of Particle Flow, and how the influence and position of forces, such as wind and drag, can greatly alter the final result.
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In this tutorial we will look at integrating a nice ground fracture into a live action shot. The process will look at using a our source video as the texture and how we can project and ‘stick’ it to the fragments. I will also cover how to set up a multi/sub object material and us it in conjunction with Rayfire to assign the correct texture to correct side of a fragment. We will also use Rayfire to fracture our street.
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In this tutorial, regular author Chandan Kumar will show you how to create a realistic candle and flame in 3d Studio Max. The candle’s flame will be made entirely in 3dsmax using built-in tools, rather then expensive third-party plugins! Let’s take a look!
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Twice a month we revisit some of our reader’s favorite posts from throughout the history of Cgtuts+. Today we’re taking a look back at Gottfried Hofmann’s introduction to smoke simulations in Blender 2.5. This tutorial was originally published back in June of 2010, and proved to be very popular with our Blender users. So if you missed it the first time, why not check it out now.
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Creating nice effects with Modynamics is pretty easy with Cinema 4D’s new tools. However, to be able to create a realistic smashing effect, it’s not enough to just break the wall into pieces, we need more then that to make it believable. So in this tutorial we’ll cover using Modynamics along with particles to create this effect. We’ll employ an emitter object to easily create our particles, and then use some supplementary tools to control the effect, creating a neat, realistic animation of our wall being destroyed.
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In this tutorial, author Cristian Pop will show us how to use ParticleFlow to cover our scenes with snow, procedurally. Using a simple ParticleFlow setup, we’ll be able to create impressive snow scenes, in a short time. Let’s take a look!
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