Rocket & Smoke Trail

So, I have reached the scene in my animation where the Anti Air Turret will shoot a rocket to the X-Wing. In order to do this I had to work in both a rocket and the smoke trail.


The Rocket


The rocket was quite simple to make as it is made from a simple cylinder. As usual I have been extruding, scaling and moving the side polygons of the cylinder until I modelled a rocket I like. I do not have to say anything else about the rocket so here are the screen captures:

When I had the model I applied an Architectural (metal, flat) material with a texture taken from Google Images.

The Smoke Trail.


The tools that 3ds Max offers the user to work with particle system are numerous, but because I know exactly what I was looking for (the trail of smoke a rocket leaves behind when flying in the air) I followed a great tutorial I found in Youtube who helped me to get the grasp of the SUPER SPRAY particle system. The link for the tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmhinne0BU.


The two features that I had to play with are super spray settings and materials. In the Spray settings I had to choose and change the following things:


- The size of each single particle.
- The shape of the particles produced by the spray.
- The amount (or intensity of the smoke) of particles produced by the spray.
- The time frame where the spray starts producing the particles.
- The life duration of the particles (depending on how long do I want the trail to be)

About the Materials I had to create a standard material with the MASK property. I did not use any textures for the smoke, it is just a mix of three colours combined together (white for the new particles, light grey for the medium aged particles and dark grey for the old aged particles) that will create the final colour of the smoke.