WhirlwindIn this tutorial we are going to use particle flow to create two systems ... combined they will give us a pretty decent twister.

Example Animation Preview can be viewed here: http://animation.diclementi.com/whirlwind.mov

First things first, we will have to create several elements in our scene that will be used in our particle systems. We are going to need a bunch of space warps in this one, 3 different variations of wind and a vortex. We are also going to need a dummy object that we can animate which we will link our particle systems to so that the twister can follow a path.

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Go to your create tab, and then over to the space warps button. and create 3 winds in your top viewport, we will get to the settings here in a moment. By creating them in your top viewport, all three wind icons should have their arrows pointing up.

Choose one of them and tilt it to the side, so the arrow is pointing to the left side of your screen.

Select the wind we just turned on its side, and go to the modify tab to adjust the wind settings.

I named this wind "Side Wind" just so I know which is which later on.

I gave it a Strength of 0.0.

I want this wind to only add a degree of turbulence to my scene, not actually push anything around.

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Then I gave it a Turbulence of 0.15, A frequency of 1.0, and a Scale of 0.3. This wind will add a more chaotic variety to how my particles swirl around the vortex and nothing more.

Next, select one of your other two created winds, does not matter which at this time.

I named this one "High Frequency Wind" ... it will serve as a second turbulence mixer to add more natural variety, I called it what I did because I plan on making one with a high frequency turbulence, and one with a low frequency just for variety.

Once again make your Strength 0.0, all we are after is turbulence here.

A low turbulence of 0.1A higher frequency of 2.0and a different scale from the last at 0.1Play with these numbers later on once you see what they are doing to really get a good idea of they do.

Select your final wind, I named mine "Low Frequency Wind" based on the settings I will use and as a way of keeping them all seperate.

Once again, a Strength of 0.0, no need for wind, just turbulence.

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Make this a very low turbulence at 0.05a much lower frequency at 0.5and then give it a different scale from the last, about 0.3 should do.

In future projects these numbers may need changed greatly based on how large you want your whirlwinds, etc. Experiment with them a bit once we get our particles moving so you truly understand what they do for you.

Now we will create the true heart of any good twister. The Vortex. To go your Create tab, back over to the spacewarps, and find Vortex in the list of options.

Click and drag out an icon in your top viewport, you will find that the arrow is pointing down, get your rotate tool and reverse it so the arrow is pointing in the up direction.

This fun little space warp is going to give us the circular patterned winds we need for a tornado. Once you have the vortex created and have made sure the arrow points up, select the icon and move over to your Modify tab so we can adjust its settings.

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The vortex can be a tricky little thing to manipulate, so you may want to spend some good time experimenting with it later on.

The Timing settings for On and Off are up to you, I want to make sure it is on and working before it ever hits frame 1 of my animation so I made the On a -50, I also want to make sure it will last for the entire animation no matter what length I end up with, so I just added a 0 and bumped it up to 1000.

The Taper amount will give you the funnel shape, increase for a tighter more pointed taper, decrease for a wider one. I raised it a little bit, just because I think a tighter funnel means a more powerful twister.

In the motion settings, we are going to leave the first couple at their default and reduce the Orbital Speed, it's a very touchy setting and if it is set too high it will simply fling our particles out farther and farther. I want it to stay close in to create the funnel shape so I dropped it to 0.1.

The Radial Pull is also a touchy setting, I find that you don't need much of a pull to keep the particles in check, so I reduced it to 0.05.

I made the Icon size 6.0 just to give myself a starting size for where the funnel will touch down.We can animate this vortex moving around, and have our particle systems link to it in order to create a feeling of movement in our overall cloud, personally I like to use a

Dummy object to link all these items to, because it gives me a nice green unrenderable box that is easy to see, can be whatever size I like, and will make it easier to animate in the long run.

Move your vortex to the left side of your grid in the perspective viewport, this will be our starting position.

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Then go back to your create tab, move over towards the space warps but stop on helpers, the icon that looks like a small tape measure.

We are going to create a Dummy object, which is nothing but an invisible box that we can animate and have all the other parts of our puzzle follow.

Click and drag to draw a dummy box in your top viewport so that it is just a bit bigger than our vortex, so the box surrounds it, housing the vortex inside.

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Then use your Link tool, in the upper left hand corner of 3DS Max, click on the vortex and drag to the new dummy object and then let go to link.

Now wherever you move the dummy object, the vortex will follow along for the ride. We will animate this later as we will also want to similarly link our particle flow source icons to it as well.

For now, let's start making particles. Get to Particle View (6) or get there by going to the Graph Editors Menu and finding it in the list.

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By now I am hoping you are fairly familiar with this window, if you have never seen it before you may want to step out and do a simpler tutorial for particle flow, or read the help files, or research it some on the internet.

This is an effects tutorial so I'd like to keep it moving right along, drag an Empty flow from the operator list below and drop it in the empty light grey stage area of particle view to create our first PF Source Icon.

This orange icon will be where the particles are emitted for our first piece of our twister. Select it, then click on the Align tools button at the top of your screen.

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Then once the button has been toggled on, click on the vortex you created. An align box should open up.

Mark all three axis positions

set the object and target to Pivot Point

and click on OK.

Your PF Source icon should jump to right on top of your Vortex. Now use the link tool just like we did for the vortex and link the new PF Source icon to the Dummy Object as well.

Now the particle emitter, and the vortex will follow your dummy object. Go back to your Particle View to continue.

The box you created in the light grey stage area should be named "PF Source 001" Click on that name and then adjust some settings to the right in the command panel area.

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Change the Icon type to Circle (square tornadoes are so last year)

Set the Diameter of the circle to 10. (this should keep it inside our vortex icon making a nice neat package.

Make sure as always to set your Viewport % to 100 (unless your computer can't handle lots of particles in which case this is a good place to display only some of them)

Add a few zeroes to the upper limit, just to make sure our viewport isn't cutting us off after a certain number of particles.

Then Drag out a birth and drop it under the first box in the empty light grey space below our PF Source and connect the blue node, to the empty circle node on the second box.

Select the birth operator and adjust its settings to the right.

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I want my tornado to start at frame 0, and continue on for quite awhile... I chose to go with 250 frames. I am starting with an extreme amount of particles here at 1 hundred thousand, but to be quite honest this number will probably go up even further when I'm finished and ready to render. If your computer is choking on this many, try reducing the number here or reducing that Viewport % number in the PF Source settings.

Click on the Display that was created underneath the Birth operator for you, change the top dropdown menu from Ticks to Lines (it makes the particles easier to work within the viewport and the line shape also makes it look really cool ;) )

Now add a Position Icon operator from the list, drag and drop it between the birth and the display.

The default settings for this one will work just fine, so no need to make any changes in the command panel.

Next, drag and drop a Force operator to below the Position Icon we just made.

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Then using the By List button in the Force settings, add in all 3 of our winds, and the vortex. (note, be careful scrubbing back and forth along your timeline ... until we tell the particles to die off we are creating an awful lot of them and it may freeze your computer up good... I recommend waiting for now to see the twister at work)

Next, we will give our particles a shape so that they can actually appear in the final render. Drag a Shape operator from the list below and add it up underneath our force.

The particles will be pretty small, so you can choose whatever you like for the 3D shape, because we are going to have so many particles however ... I recommend a shape with as few number of faces as possible, I chose Sphere 20-sides for this one.

We are making specs of dirt, dust, and debris for our funnel wind so I left the size very small at 0.1, I did turn on the scale% checkbox and give it a Variation of 60 percent as well, just so they aren't all exactly the same sized bits of dust.

Next, drag an all important delete to the button of our Event001 box.

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Set the Delete to "By Particle Age" and give it a life span of 15 with a variation of 22, and as always it's a good idea to just click the New button next to the uniqueness seed.

These numbers will determine how long your particles survive, if you want a taller twister ... increase the Life span but know that the longer the particles last, the harder your computer will choke on their calculations.

Now you can scrub through your animation timeline and see your resulting whirlwind.

Not bad eh? we have the thicker dirt particles finished, but if we really want to make this tornado look like a cloud of dust we need to make ourselves a secondary system for the finer fluffier dust clouds.

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Before we do that we are going to add a couple more operators to the very top box of our first particle system. Drag and drop a Material Static up underneath the "Render 001" operator in the first box, and a Cache below that -

I will leave it up to you how you would like to texture your dirt particles, but at least we have the material operator there now to support your addition of a texture ... and the Cache will help your computer from choking on all the particles we have made. In the Cache settings you may wish to find the "Memory Used (K): limit and increase it by a couple of 00's so that it uses all the memory available.

Now we are finished with our first particle system, let's make another system and blend in some finer dust clouds. In order to do this, we are going to use a trick and create a texture map of a small cloud of dust which we will duplicate and blend in a new particle system. To do that, you will need some images, I got these images from the "Samples" that ship out with 3DS Max in the first place and just modified them a bit to my purposes. You can simply download them from here: http://animation.diclementi.com/tutorials/dust_maps.zip

In the .zip folder you will find 2 .jpgs, one brownish colored dust cloud, and one grey and white. Unpack them someplace where you will remember where they are.

Back to Particle View -

We have already created a system for spinning and churning up our particles, so we don't have to do a lot of that work over again, we can simply copy what we had. Click and Drag a selection marquee around the Event 001 box to select it and all the operators inside of it.

Hold down your shift key, a small + sign will appear on your mouse cursor. continue holding it and click and drag the selected Event001 box over to the empty space to the right and drop it.

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A Clone dialogue window will open, mark it copy and hit OK. Wallah! We have duplicated all our hard work, and now only need to make some small changes to it for our secondary cloud of dust.

We will create the second PF Source Icon on our own however, so click and drag an Empty flow from the operators list, to the space above our newly created Event 002 box.

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You will instantly get a second orange PF Source Icon in your viewport.

All we have to do is adjust its settings a little, and move it over on top of our other sytem, linking it to the dummy.

Click on your New PF Source 002 box to adjust its settings a little differently.

All we have to do is make this Diameter a little bigger for this one, Change it to 15.0 instead of 10.

The rest should remain correct from our original adjustments in the first system.

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Now, select the new PF Source 002 Icon, and use the align tool the same way we did the first time. Toggle on the Align tool, then click on your first PFlow Source 001 icon to align it.

All the settings should be the same, hit ok and it should jump right on top of the original emitter, this one is just a little bigger around in diameter. Then link the new Emitter, to the Dummy object the exact same way as we did the first.

To make sure you did it right, either review what we did earlier in this document, or grab the Dummy object and try moving it around with the move tool, All 3 things should go with it, The Vortex, The PF Source 001 Icon, and the PF Source 002 Icon.

Good! Now back to Particle View!

We are going to need to make some changes to the Event 002 box that we copied over from our first part. To start, select the Force 002 Operator, and in its settings highlight the Wind we did not rename, and click remove. We don't need the sideward facing wind in this one.

Next, we are not going to use the shape like we did in the first one, instead we are going to replace it with a new operator called "Shape Facing"

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Drag and Drop a Shape Facing operator on top of the Shape 002 operator in our second Event box, wait till the line shows red which means we will replace the old with the new.

The Shape Facing operator creates a single 4 sided polygon, and allows us to make sure that the forward side of the polygon is ALWAYS looking right at the camera. This way when we texture each little plane with a dust cloud, we will get a whole bunch of dust clouds all looking towards the camera. It's a cheap trick to create the illusion of depth, even though all of them are just photos pointing at our camera. This trick only works however, if we have a camera to begin with. So let's make one.

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Move your Perspective Viewport position around until you have something similar to what I show above. We can see the majority of the Grid, and the Particle system and dummy objects are on the left. This leaves us plenty of room to animate our twister moving from one side to the other. Once you have a good view, press Ctrl+C. Your perspective viewport will now become a Camera which will show up in your scene in all the other viewports.

Now go back to Particle View and Select the Shape Facing we added to our Second Event box. At the top of it's settings you will see a None channel box button, click it and then click on the newly created camera in your scene.

We can leave our Size settings at the Default for this with a Units of 1.0

Be sure to change the Orientation from its default position to the "Random" setting.

and Click the New button for the Seed to get something different.

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Next Click on your Delete 02 operator in the Second Event Box and make it a little different than our original.

Next, Add a Scale operator to the bottom of the new Event list and adjust its settings to the right.

This will make our planes start small and grow as they move upwards in our spiral at a rate of 110% growth each frame, give or take 2.0%.

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Click on the New Birth Operator in our Event 002 box, and reduce the amount from 100,000 to something much smaller like 3000.

Finally, click on the Display operator in our new Event 002 box, and change the top drop down from lines to Geometry so we can see the shape facings.

You will see something quite startling that looks nothing like our whirlwind anymore. Don't worry, the trick is all in the texture for this dust.

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Open your material editor (M) and choose a blank texture slot.

Mark the Face Map checkbox, and then add a Bitmap to the Diffuse channel box. When the screen pops up asking you what image you would like to use, find where you saved the 2 .jpgs I had you download. Select the brownish colored one and say ok. Then click the go to parent button to get back out to the above level of your texture.

Then click on the Opacity Channel Box, select bitmap... and navigate to the second image dustball3_mask.jpg22

Then hit the go to parent button to return to the layer shown in the above image again. Make sure you click on the Show standard Map in viewport button so it will show up in your Viewport as the texture we just made.

Back in Particle View, Add a Material Static operator, to below the Render 002 in the top box of our second particle system. Then assign this new texture to the operator settings.

That's it, you have yourself a tornado with 2 different kinds of debris... just remember that 3DS Max does not do Volumetric smoke very well so we had to use the Shape Facing trick. If you try to render this scene from a viewport that is not the assigned Camera in our Shape Facing operator, it will look terrible. However, the illusion works rather well when rendered from the camera we made.

You can now turn on your autokey and animate your Dummy object moving across your scene, etc.

More recommendations would include adding some ground, some lights, a texture to the first dust particle system, and turning on Motion Blur to get a more swirly effect out of your particles.

To see a finished Preview of this effect, you can again visit and download the .mov here http://animation.diclementi.com/whirlwind.mov

It is only a preview animation with a single still of the end render effect, as this one takes a LONG time to render out a full animation.

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I hope you enjoyed this one!

Here is a finished render with Motion blur, a Ground Plane, and a Couple of Lights...

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