Fireworks with PFlow

In this tutorial we are going to take a look at my method for making big fancy fireworks! Boom Boooom Hurray!

Ok, now that that is out of my system. Lets open ourselves a new 3DS Max scene. We are going to have to put on our work hats and create an advanced particle flow particle system for this, as well as several textures, and rendering tricks so that these look right! Let's start with the particle system itself.

Once you have a new Max scene, hit 6 on your keyboard to open up particle view. You can also get there by going to the Graph Editors menu and finding Particle View in the list. If hitting 6 doesn't bring up particle view, then the answer is most likely that your Keyboard Shortcut Override Toggle button is not turned on, it looks like this:

With this button depressed your hotkey shortcut of 6 will open particle view. Once in particle view which you should probably be fairly familiar with before digging into this tutorial as it is a little bit more of an advanced effect and I don't want to waste time with the bare bones basics in this tutorial, you will see the empty light grey staging area, where we will build our flow chart. The white area filled with the events, this area is called the Depot, and the Parameters area on the right side of the window where all of our settings and descriptions of the events are located.

<- Parameters

Stage->

Depot->

We will build our particle system using the events found in the depot and adjust each of their settings as we build a flow chart for our particles.

All good particles need a beginning and the beginning is almost always the same, Let's find and drag out an empty flow and drop it in the Stage area.

Then follow that with a birth, also dropped in the empty stage area, below the first box.

And connect the two with the blue dongle from the first box, dragged to the empty circle node on top of the second box.

Like this:

This creates our particle systems and allows for the rendering of its particles, The birth is our first event setting where we will dictate how our particles are created.

Select Birth and go to the Parameters area to adjust its settings:

I am having my particles born right away at frame 0, so both of my emit start and stop are set to 0. If you want your particles to start later on in your animation, then just change these, but keep them the same for this one as we want all of our initial particles born on the same frame for this effect.

In the Amount box, type 10. We don't need many to get this event started as later on it will explode into a lot more.

Next find, drag and drop a Position Icon from the depot list to our second box, just underneath the Birth. Like this:

Make sure the line is blue before you let go of the mouse button, if it is read then whatever the red line is crossing through will be deleted and replaced by the new event.

Blue means we are adding an event between our first two, The Birth and the Display.

Once you have added your Position Icon, go to the Parameters and adjust its settings. We want all of our particles to be born close together and all at once, so make your Location drop down menu read "Pivot"

This is probably a great time to notice that the arrow on our Particle Flow Source Icon is pointing down, which is backwards for a firework that is shot up into the sky.

Select your icon and with the rotate tool, rotate it 180 degrees until the arrow points straight up. If you have your rotate tool you can be exact by using the coordinates below your timeline. Like this:

Type 180 in the X axis coordinate shown above and hit enter. Your PFSource icon should now be pointing to the sky.

Good, back to Particle View so we can continue building our system.

Find, drag and drop a Shape from the depot to our Event list just below the Position Icon.

and adjust its settings to the right ->

Make your Shape a Sphere 20-sides (we don't need a ton of polys, just something toshow up for our render)

And reduce its size to 1.0, we don't need giant spheres exploding out of our emitter.

Next, drag and drop a Speed from the depot to the list below our Shape:

and reduce the speed in thesettings to 150. We don't needthe particles flying off screenfaster than we can see them. ->

The default Along Icon Arrowis fine since we turned our arrowaround just before this. Notice though that you can reverse also.

Now we get to some of the fun tricky stuff, let's make our clump of particles have a rocket tail! It is a rocket after all.

Add a Spawn from the depot to the list in Event01 below our speed.

Adjust its settings to the right. ->

Set it to By Travel Distance, and reduce the step size to 0.2. Make 10% of them Spawnable and leave 1 in the Offspring.

This means that everytime 10% of our 10 particles (so 1 of them) travels a distance of 0.2 units, it will spawn another particle.

In the Speed settings:

Make the Inherited 20.0, this means the new particles will be slower than the original one instead of staying right with it, it will trail behind.

Divergence give it a 10.0, the lower the number the straighter the line behindthe particle, the larger the number the wider your particles will stray. We wanta sort of cone shaped rocket burst so a fairly low number of 10 will keep them in line for the most part.

Now before we do anything else, including scrubbing along the timeline to see our trails, we have to tell these rocket tails when to stop spawning, otherwise we will crash our computers and have never ending rocket tails.

So find and drag and drop a Delete event from the Depot, into the empty grey stage area to the left of our Spawn.

And connect the blue dongle node to the empty circle like we did before from the Spawn to the delete event.

Then select your Delete and adjust the settings to the right.

Set it to Particle Age and make the Life Spawn 2 with a variation of 2 as well.

Now go ahead and scrub down your timeline to see the results.

The particles die off after a couple of frames of life, so the tails kept nice and short and not crashing our computers.

Go ahead and add a Material Dynamic to the list below our delete, we'll come back to this when we start to texture our particles, but we might as well put it in now.

Then go back to our first Event01 box and we can continue on with our particles there. Event02 is completed.

Find and add an Age Test, to below the Spawn in our Event01 box. This will then tell our particles that once they reach a life of 25, they will be told to do something else. In the case of a firework, explode into sparkles.

Adjust the settings of our Age Test to the Test Value of 25, with 0 variation. Meaning at frame 25, they will move into the next phase of their instructions.

You can go ahead and add another Material Dynamic to this Event01 box as well, and we'll come back to it when we texture later on also.

Next, we will add the portion of our Particle Flow chart, that tells the firework which is currently still in rocket phase, to explode into a new pattern of particles.

Drag a new Spawn event from the depot, and drop it in the empty grey stage area to the lower right of our Event01 box and connect the blue node to the circle node from our Age Test, to the new spawn event03 box:

Then select the new spawn and adjust its settings:

Mark once, and Delete parent. This is the explosion so we are going to have them appear all at once and travel outwards.

100% of our particles should spawn offspring in this oneThey should each spawn 150 offspring. 10x150= lots of sparkles!

Give them an inherited speed of 70.0 with a variation of 15.0. To keep things interesting.

Divergence of 180 which means they can shoot out in any direction, not just straight up or down like our rocket tails.

Let's make these particles a bit more visible with a scale of 150%. They are in fact the main attraction of the firework, not the little rocket tail.

True fireworks will start obeying gravity at this juncture in their life, and the sparkles will rain down to the ground after the explosion of color right? So let's go to our create tab, and find the spacewarps button to make a gravity.

Draw out your gravity in the Top Viewport, so that the arrow is pointing in the correct direction (down). Like I have done here:

Then with the gravity still selected, go to the modify tab, and adjust its settings.

Give it a strength of 0.1, we don't want them to fall too fast, just gradually.

Now we can return to our particle view and drag and drop a Force from the event depot to the empty grey stage area below our last Spawn. Then connect the blue dongle node from the spawn, to our new Force event.

Adjust the settings for theforce event like these. -->

Click the By List button, andselect our Gravity from the resulting menu, adding it to the list of Space Warps thatour particles will obey.

You should be able to see your rocket shoot up, and then explode into a bunch of new particles which then start falling after the explosion. Let's take this a step further though and make a secondary bunch of particle trails that will appear as the particles explode out from the center.

Add another Spawn to our Event04 box just below the force.

Adjust its settings like this:

Make this one a By Travel Distance as well

Step Size of 0.5 again will make nice solid trails.Make only 2% of the new particles spawn trails, otherwise we'd have 150 trails and that would make things a bit chaotic don't you think?

Offspring of 1 per step distance. So 1 particle ever half a unit traveled we'll get a particle.

Make them slower so they trail behind by giving them a lower Inherited Speed of 10.0.

No divergence at all this time so we get straight line streaks.

Scale these ones back to 50% so the trail streaks are smaller than the main event particles.

Just like our rocket tails, we have to tell these ones when to stop or our trails would go on forever and crash our computers.

So drag another delete event to the empty grey stage area off to the left of our current event.

and connect the new spawn to this event like above:

Set your new delete to By Particle Age, with a lifespan of 10 and a variation of 5.

You should be able to see the effects by scrubbing across your timeline now.

I'd say our particles look quite a bit like a firework, wouldn't you?

We still have some work to do though!

Add another Material Dynamic below the new Delete event so we can come back and texture our streaks.

Then return to the event box where we added the Spawn for the streaks and add a Delete event below the Spawn.

This delete will be used to make our main event sparkles die out after a few frames.

Adjust the delete settings for this one to Particle Age, Life Span 10 and Variation 10. This will keep the sparks from falling forever and they will kind of burn out like a real firework does (hopefully before hitting the ground and starting a fire right?)

Then add one last Material Dynamics below that and we can get started on the textures now that our particles are behaving like fireworks, let's make them look like fireworks.

Open up your Material Editor (M) and find an empty texture slot. Name this texture "Rocket" so we don't get mixed up later on.

Then click on the empty Diffuse channel map button and add Particle Age from the resulting list.

This material changes based on how old the particles are.

Adjust the color swatches of the particle age texture to match mine and then click the Go to Parent button to exit the map and get back to the main texture menu.

Once back to the main texture menu, click and drag the Diffuse channel map, now marked with an M. to the Self Illumination channel box. Select Copy from the popup menu.

Also mark the Color checkbox. Like above:

This will make the particles for our rocket trail glow yellow and orange as they shoot into the sky.

Next we will assign this texture to our particles during the rocket phase of their animation sequence.

Go back to Particle View, and find the first 2 Material Dynamics we added. We will apply this texture to both of them.

Select one of them, and then click and drag our new texture, to the None button in said material dynamics settings, like this:

Then just do the exact same thing for the second Material Dynamic shown in the previous image.

If you named your texture "rocket" like I did, then the name of the texture should appear next to both of these Material Dynamic events in your particle system.

If they don't appear, you may need to simply refresh the particle flow by turning it off and then on again using the light bulb in the very first PFSource01 box.

Now, let's make our second texture, for when the rocket explodes into the actual firework.

Find another empty material slot in your Material Editor (M), and label this one "sparks".

Then in the empty diffuse channel box, add another Particle Age.

These are the main explosion sparks that go in a large circle around the firework, so they can really be any color you like. I have chosen to make mine green because it's my favorite. Make your Particle Age color swatches match mine, or choose your own favorite colors, just make them vary in shades at the 0, 50, and 100% mark in the particles lives, leaving the final one black as the sparks need to burn out completely by 100% of their life.

When you have your colors the way you want them, click the Go to Parent button again to return to the textures main menu settings.

Once more we will copy the Particle Age from our Diffuse color to the Self Illumination Map channel box.

Then we will find the next Material Dynamic in our particle flow, the one for the main event sparks, and assign this texture to it's None button.

We have only one Material Dynamic left to work on, if you want the streaks in the middle of the explosion to be the same color you can just add this one to the next Material Dynamic, or you can make a new texture for the streaks in the middle and really add some contrast to this explosion.

I am going to make the streaks a different color, perhaps purple?

Find yet another empty material slot and name this one "streaks"

We are going to do the exact same thing to this texture as we did for the last two, just different colors, so click on the Diffuse channel button, and add Particle Age.

Again make sure that the Color #3 is black so the sparks burn out by 100% of their lives, the other two make a variation of whatever color you choose, then hit the go to parent button to return to the main texture settings, and copy it over to the Self illumination channel.

Then find the last Material Dynamic in your Particle Flow chart, and add this texture to it's None button.

Now we can adjust our render settings with a couple extra effects to make these fireworks really sparkle as well as add a motion blur to our fireworks so they don't look like the spheres they actually are, but more like streaks of light.

Hit F10 to go to your render Setup window.

When it opens, find the Renderer tab at the top of the dialogue menu. ^

Scroll down until you find the Camera Effects settings

Check the box under Motion Blur to enable it.

Then find the Camera Shaders and enable the Output box.

You can adjust the amount of glare your fireworks have by clicking and draging the (Glare) shader to an empty slot in your material editor.

I bumped my glare settings up to 4 each, because I really want these lights to sparkle up in the sky.

We can leave this as is, or we can add even more flare to our fireworks by adding a lens effect called Glow to the textures.

In order to do this, we first have to assign what is called a Material ID to all the textures that we want to glow.

Go back to your Material editor and find your rocket, sparks, and streaks textures.

Select the rocket texture, and then look for the Material ID button which looks like the number 0 surrounded by a box.

If you click, and hold the mouse button on this Material ID Channel button, it will bring up a selection menu.

You can select any of these numbers you like, as long as you remember what you chose for our next step. I chose 4.

I then changed all the Material ID numbers to 4 for the rocket, sparks, and streaks textures.

If they all have the same Material ID number, then I can make them all glow with a single Lens Effect.

Next, hit 8 on your keyboard to open up the Environment & Effects Panel. You can also get here through the Rendering menu at the top of your screen, and finding Environment in the list.

When the menu opens, find the Effects tab at the top and click it.

Click the Add button, and from the resulting list choose Lens Effects.

with lens effects selected in the Effects list, scroll down to the Lens Effects Parameters and select and move Glow over to the empty box on the right.

Then with the glow selected in the right side box, scroll down to adjust its settings further.

Make the size of your glow pretty small, at 0.5. to keep it from getting crazy, and reduce it's intensity to 60.0 or so

Uncheck Glow Behind and change the Use Source Color all the way up to 100.0 so they all glow the proper shade of green, purple, and gold.

Then click on the Options Tab.

Check the box next to Material ID, and set this number to match the one you chose for your Materials. In my case I chose 4.

That's it!, you are finished.

Now just make more fireworks, more colorful textures, and render them all out!

You can see an example of a few fireworks in full animated glory here:

animation.diclementi.com/fireworks.html

Hopefully this was a fun and in depth look at Particle Flow, Texturing for particles, and Render effects to add some virtual flare to your 4th of July or New Years celebration!