So I seriously injured my back from snowboarding earlier this year... 3 herniated disks (commonly, but wrongly, called slipped disks). I had plenty of time to myself and my animation. Oh what a pleasant surprise, I thought, as I lay on my back in pain - I can do some awesome animation!!!
I wanted to learn some 3DS Max particles and I found a nice little tut here about some cloud particles here -
http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/3ds_max_cloud_tutorial_faking_ray_marching_using_gradients_and_distance_bas
Thanks to Jonas Ussing on The Area website.
Here is my first attempt at the tutorial-
After doing this tut I thought it looked pretty good, so I added to it... Well 5 months later, it's done.
I did all of it in my spare time after work. I used an X-Wing model care of the lovely geeks at WOLF 359 - http://wolf359a.anet-stl.com/menu.html
I rendered separate passes out of Max and comp'ed then together in Fusion. A very steep learning curve there.
It's all Scanline rendering as the technique from the tut required this. So it was just a simple matter of putting in a Sun light and an ambient light for the x-wing.
The Thrusters were also done with Max particles along with the explosion.
I found some great sound effects from http://www.starwars.com
They have a whole bunch of sound effects that you can mix together on their website. Unfortunately they're not for download. So I was a bit cheeky and I found the cached files on my computer, added a .mp3 on the end of each one, and bobs your uncle - free sound effects.
Well anyway, BEHOLD:
