Step
3
The
next step is important. Here, I will apply a glow
to the particle system. The first thing you need to
do, is to go to the "Rendering" menu in
the main interface. Here, select "Video Post".
You will then see this dialogue box:
The
Video Post.
I have marked two buttons we will need to look at
first. The button marked 1 is the "Add Scene
Event" button. Here, you can define which viewport
which you will render from, and other features, such
as Motion Blur. We will only deal with Viewport selection.
Click on this button and click "OK" after
you have made sure that the Camera is selected as
View.
The
second button (2) is called "Add Image Filter
Event", and is where you can add new filters
to the scene, such as Glow, Fade and Image Alpha.
Click on this button and you will see this box:
Select "Glow" in the "Filter Plugin"
box, and click "Setup". This will bring
up a box where you can define the glow you want to
use.
The Glow control box.
I
have marked the parameters, and here is what they
do:
Material
Effect Channel. Remember the channel we set in the
materials editor? This should be the same number.
If you have set number 8 in the mat. editor, use 8
here as well
Colour. Select the colour you want the glow to be.
In my case, I picked a very light blue colour. Select
"User" to be able to define the colour.
Glow size. Here you must experiment. This will vary
from scene to scene. I used 15 in this example.
Ok, now you have set up the glow for the sparks. This
is essentially it. To render this scene from the video
post, go all the w
ay
back to the Video Post main window, and click on this
button: to bring up the "Execute Video Post"
box. Here, select the frame you want to render (frame
10 in my case) and which frame size (in my case, 320x240).
Then click render. Remember to select a single frame.
If you want to animate it, select which range. Then
click "Render" to render the scene with
glow. And that's it. You have now made electrical
sparks in 3D Studio MAX. Here is the rendered scene:
The rendered scene.
If
you wonder why the sparks are falling a bit down,
this is because I added gravity to it. This is not
necessary, so I will not go into it here. As a final
note; if you want to animate this, just adjust the
Particle System's birth frame, so that the particles
are already flowing in your first frame. For instance,
if you start rendering in frame 0 (zero), adjust the
system so it starts at frame -10. And that's it. Happy
sparking.
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