Smoke Vs Glow

This self-discussion came to me when thinking about a trace left by the X-Wing thrusters. After doing some research in the internet and testing it by myself I realised that smoke would be the way to go.


 I know that in the Star Wars films the space ships do not leave a trace of smoke (of light if any) but I could argue that the lack of Oxygen in the outer space prevents the thrusters from creating a combustion, therefore no smoke is left behind. Since my animation happens just meters (or feet!) away from the surface of a snowy planet, I think it is OK if I use smoke as trace.


I made the smoke following this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmhinne0BU and when applied to my X-Wing it looks like this, which I think looks cool!

Another idea was to use a light trace. In this case I was going to use the GLOW tool included in 3ds Max.


I am sure that there is many way of making an object glow but following this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QAHIYCYB3o this is what I did:


First I spawned a torus knot and added it a green material with self illumination (with a green tone). Then, with the material selected, I went to Render Environment and added a Lens effect and then a glow effect to the material. I had to give the material an ID number (4 in this case) to be able to reference the material within the Render Environment window.


Once this is done it is a mater of playing with the size, brightness and 1&2 colours until I achieve whatever I want. As you can see it works pretty bad as engine trace but it works great as light bulbs, which I am going to use for the antenna and for the turret.

This is how I achieved the lights: