Model a Rocket with Particle Trail in Maya ~ Pol 3D

Application Used: Autodesk Maya

Author: Bogdan Amidzic

Contact:the@cavz.com

Author Website:http://www.cavz.com/

Model a Rocket with particle trail

In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to create a rocket using NURBS, and then animate its movement using path curve. I'll also show how to make a simple smoke trail.

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First go to create/CV curve tool.

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Then just click to make points. Create a simple profile for the rocket. If you make a mistake, just press delete and the point will be deleted. When you've finished, press Enter.

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So you will get something like this:

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Next, select that curve and go to Surface/revolve option box

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In the options window, set it to rotate around the Z axis.

So now, you've got some basic rocket geometry.

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If you want to tweak the rocket shape, just select the curve and edit it. The rocket shape will be updated. Note that construction history must be on (it is on by default).

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Now select the rocket geometry and go to isoparm mode and select the last isopram.

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Then go to surfaces/planar. This will create a planar surface from the selected shape.

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Now create more curves like this.

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Select them all.

Now, revolve them.

From the top view, create another curve. This will form the shape of the wing.

Duplicate it.

Move its points to the axis. Just select all CV's and hold X and move them towards the axis.

Tweak it.

Now select both curves.

And go to surfaces/loft. This will make a surface between the selected curves.

Now we have the wing, but it is one sided. Since its pivot point lies at 0,0,0 - just duplicate it and set the negative scale around the Axis (I think it was Z in my case).

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Now select both wing surfaces and group them.

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Then go to duplicate options (now it's called duplicate special) and make three copies at every 90 degrees around the Z axis.

So the rocket geometry is completed.

Now select all curves and delete them. You can mask selection by unchecking surfaces. Then just grab the selection and only curves will be selected. Also delete history on surfaces.

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Assign shaders to the rocket.

Create point light. Move it to the back of the rocket and set intensity to something high (5 or 10) and set decay to linear.

Press 7 to see the lighting in viewport.

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Select rocket geometry and light and group them. Set the group's name to rocket.

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You can freeze transform the group. This will set all attributes to 0. You can make a layer and put the rocket in it. Refer the help for more info about layers.

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Now for a simple terrain. Create a polygon plane and set divisions to 100x100. Then go to sculpt geometry tool

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Deform the surface to look like a terrain.

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Make directional light and set intensity to 1.2 and color to light yellow or orange.

Make path curve for rocket.

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Now select rocket group and the path. Go to animation mode motion paths/attach to motion path option box.

Set time as you wish, I've set mine to 100 frames. As you can see, the rocket tip is oriented to negative Z. Set front vector to Z and up to Y. Check inverse front, so it will inverse Z to negative Z.

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When you attach it, the rocket will be set to the beginning of motion path. Play the animation. Cool?

Now smoke. Go to dynamics mode and go to particles/create emitter. By default it will create an omni emitter at 0,0,0. Also it will create a particle1 node. Move the emitter to the rocket's back:

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Then MMB drag the emitter to rocket group in outliner. This will parent the emitter to the rocket, so its movement is relative to the rocket.

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If you play the animation, the particles will appear behind the rocket. Select emitter and set speed to 0.2.

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Under particleShape1 go to render attributes and set Particle Render Type to Cloud (S/W). Set radius to 0.4 (these numbers are relative to scene size, so you might need to experiment).

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Then white particles are assigned the particle cloud shader to them (same thing as assigning shader to geometry). Note: make sure that the mouse is over particle.
Make color dark gray.

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Then click on the checker on the right side of Life Incandescence attribute. This will open create texture window. Create ramp texture.
Life Incandescence will take the values from ramp, and calculate particle color based on the life of each particle. In hypershade you can see three new nodes.
Edit the ramp.

Note, the bottom of the ramp is beginning of particle's life and the top of the ramp is end. Tweak the colors to start with bright orange and change to orange and than to black.

Also make one ramp for life transparency. Set its color to go from gray to white.

This will make particles fade.

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Now you can see that every particle is the same size. I don't like that. The trail shall get thicker at the end.

So go to per particle attributes tab and click general button. Then select RadiusPP attribute, and click add.

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Notice that RadiusPP is now in the list. Hold RMB on it. You shall get small popup menu. Choose create ramp. Particle size will be connected to the ramp texture.

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Hold RMB on RadiusPP and choose edit ramp. Edit the ramp so the first color is gray with .3 value and the last color (top color) shall be set to white (value of 1).
This means that every particle will grow from .3 to 1.

Now you can render. I don't like that gaps in the trail.

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Select emitter and change rate to 400. Now more particles will be emitted.

Also you can see that particles die too fast (trail is too short). Under particleShape1 there's a tab called lifespan Attributes. Open it and set Lifespan Mode to Random Range and set lifespan to 2, and Lifespan Random to 0.2

This means that every particle will live 2 seconds (48 frames) plus/minus 0.2 seconds.

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Now the trail could behave more randomly. To do that select the particle and go to ;fields/turbulence. Set attenuation to 0. and magnitude to 2.5 or 3. Magnitude is the strength of the field. Also set frequency to 3 or 4.

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Now make a NURBS sphere and scale it. This will be the sky.

Assign surface shader to it and assign ramp texture to its color. Set the colors like I have. Also set ramp to U ramp. Also if you look at the Sphere Shape node, go to render stats tab and turn off cast shadows and receive shadows.

Now set renderer to mental ray. I prefer using mental ray with particles and fluids since it gived nice results especially when using final gather. Also mental ray provides faster raytracing with volumetric objects.

Select Directional light that you previously created and turn on raytrace shadows. Increase Shadow Rays to 5. Under mental ray settings turn on final gathering. Final gather will use that sky sphere as an illumination object.

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Now if you render, you will see some nice results. However I don't like the shading of the particles. It looks good from a distance but it's useless for close ups.

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Go back to life incandescence ramp. It should look like this. Note that the ramp is using only flat colors. But what if we could map texture to each of these colors?

Of course we can do that. Remember -- in Maya, you can map texture to everything.

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So create solidFractal and Stucco textures. Refer to Lava shader tutorial to see how to make it look like fire. Map the solid fractal to first color of the ramp (just MMB drag texture to color in the ramp). For the second color, use stucco with shaker set to 30 or 40 and map one color with fractal used in the first color. Third color of the ramp should be black. Also, it's a good idea to map color attribute of particle shader to fractal texture with small color gain. I do this just to get slight color variation.