Animation Science has recently released an update to Outburst; it’s flagship particle system plugin for 3D Studio MAX. Outburst is not your ordinary particle tool, but a very advanced physics-based engine that is integrated into MAX. In a lot of ways it’s a port of their particle system written for Softimage Extreme, but with many enhancements. Now with version 1.5, Animation Science has added new features that increase its flexibility: target obstacles and Outburst|MAX, a tool to pass Outburst particle information to Video Post and Environment effects.
Instead of offering a new particle system and spacewarps, Animation Science created Outburst as an enclosed toolset for creating particles and controlling their motions. It has it’s own emitters, particles, obstacles and forces that interact with each other. All of these functions are accessible in a very intuitive way through the rollup in the command panel.
Every particle system needs a source to emit from and Outburst’s selection is varied. You have point sources that emit from a singularity, linear sources that emit from a scalable line. Square, circle, box and spherical sources are also available as well as any geometric object in the scene. With these sources there are also controls for determining how the particles emit from these objects as they can be set up to emit from verticies, edges, faces, and from within the volume of the object. Particles can emit relative to the object’s orientation, along its normals or absolutely along the Z-Axis or up vector regardless of orientation. There are also the requisite controls for emission rate, velocity and spread along with a value for velocity inheritance that works much like inertia.
The particle parameters for Outburst are very deep and give the user lots of flexibility. Besides the normal parameters for lifetime and size, Outburst brings physics to the particles with mass and drag. There are many subtlties in motion that can be defined with minor tweaking of these two parameters. There is also a parameter to control particle-to-particle collisions within a single system as well as a feature called trail life that allows particles to leave geometric trails along their trajectories. The user can align particles to always face the camera, to tumble randomly, or to face in the direction they are travelling. Speaking of direction, particles can also be controlled by a path. There are some interesting parameters for this, one that controls them absolutely along the spline path and one that controls the influence of the path so that particles can be "attracted" to it. Particle decay is one of my favorite features in Outburst. Basically it lets you spawn other particles on death or collision. In fact it’s so easy to use that you can set up a fireworks show in no time with particles exploding into groups of other particles as they die.
Like standard MAX particles, Outburst particles can be represented in the viewports as ticks, but Outburst also adds support for viewing particle motion with lines based on velocity and crosses. The latter is unique because it accurately represents particle scale in the viewports, which is a nice bonus. Defining how particles render is controlled through several options. The most common method I use is face mapping, which is much like standard MAX particles. There are also options for rendering particles as pixels, crossing planes or as instanced geometry. The geometry options pops-up a new dialog box with controls over animation offset and synching as well as controls for exporting the particle motion keyframes to objects. I use the offset controls to make a procedurally animated flock of birds all flap their wings non-uniformly.
Particles sometimes collide with objects in a scene and Outburst gives you lots of control over how they collide. First, you can define any geometric object as an obstacle, and then you can define what event happens when particles collide with it (all of which are animatable). You can even define what parts of the obstacle will affect particles with options for all faces, inside faces and outside faces. Particles can bounce off an obstacle with controls over tangent and normals. They can also stick to the obstacle, disappear or decay. The decay parameter is great for adding sparks as bullets strike a surface. One of the new features included in Outburst 1.5 is target obstacles. In its simplest form, target obstacles give Outburst particles a goal. There are controls for how particles accellerate and decellerate as they approach a target and how particles fill a target. In a lot of ways this is like Digimation’s SandBlaster, but in a lot of ways it’s not. There is no emitter simulation, so don’t expect to be able to blow objects apart and reassemble them. However, with particle decay and controls over velocity, particles can move to a target location, slow down as they arrive, then decay to another action, then again decay to move on to another target. Targets add another level of flexibility to Outburst. Besides obstacles, Outburst also has controls for particle type collision and transformation. The collision option allows two or more separate streams to collide. In this case, the particles with the higher mass will knock the other particles around more. Transformations are a bit different. They allow multiple particle streams to transform into new particles.
No particle system would be complete without some kind of external forces to influence particle motion. Outburst has three kinds of force fields: global, local, and custom. Global fields are found in the System panel and they include directional gravity, wind, electricity and magnetism. Electricity works like the Push space warp by applying positive or negative force to particles along a vector. Magnetism is a vortex-like effect causing particles to swirl around. Gravity is the only global field that affects particles absolutely. The others’ influence can be controlled by parameters within the particle rollout. Wind only affects particles with positive or negative drag. Electric and Magnetic fields will only effect electrically and/or magnetically charged particles. This amount of flexibility is great because you can fine-tune the influence at the particle type level.
Along with the global forces, there are localized versions of Electric and Magnetic. These only affect particles relative to their areas of influence. I’ve done some complex swirling particle motions with groups of localized magnetic fields. The custom fields work a couple of different ways. They can push particles along a vector or they can be programmed with an expression to exert a custom force on particles.
Expressions in themselves are a bit different with Outburst. There is an Outburst Expressions utility that gives you access to certain aspects of the plugin allowing you to write expressions based on particle velocity, direction, age, and position. There is a simple expression that I often use that defines the size of particles based on their age and velocity.
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Outburst gives effects animators a nice toolset to create particle effects animation. There are a few limitations though. One of the most talked about is the inability for external video post filters and environment effects to key off of Outburst particles. This has been remedied with version 1.5. It includes a particle proxy of sorts called Outburst|MAX that correctly passes the information from Outburst to other tools within MAX. The other is motion blur since Outburst doesn’t support image or object motion blur. Part of this is due to the way the plugin is implemented in MAX, not as a particle system but as a procedural object. I hope this is overcome soon as it’s a strong limitation. There are a few tricks a user can use to get around this but a straightforward implementation would be nice. Overall, I am very pleased with Outburst 1.5. I consider it to be one of a select few "must have" tools for any MAX effects animator. It’s not a replacement for standard MAX particles, but a very powerful compliment to them.
Bradon Davis is a visual effects animator for Computer Cafe. He specialises in 3D Studio MAX and has produced work for feature films such as Armageddon. You can contact Brandon by email at brandon@computercafe.com.