Shockwave Tutorial

This time around I will show you how to do a pretty good looking shockwave effect not using plugins. So start max up and create a tube object with radius 1 -70 and radius 2 about 50. Set the height about .6 or .7 high as we want this to have some depth. Also give it about 70 sides.

Now apply a uvw map modifier to your tube planar will work fine.

Now open up your material editor and scroll down to your maps. Under the diffuse slot select a gradient use the settings that I did in fig 1.a. Remember to select radial or it wont look right.

fig 1.a

Next go down to the self illumination slot and select a gradient as well and use the settings like in fig 1.b. Now in the color 2 tab, select a noise map and use the settings that are in fig 1.c; note the phase has a little red square around it. This is gonna be the part that we animate later on.

fig 1.b

fig 1.c

Now, the last part we select a gradient for the opacity using the settings like in fig 2.a. In the color 2 we select a noise map and use the settings like in fig 2.b. Note the phase has a red box around it this will be for our animation, which we set to 0 at the first part of the animation and set about 15-17 for every 100 frames afterward. This will make it look more realistic in the end, but make sure you do it for the noise in both the self illumination and the noise in the opacity map. Good luck!

fig 2.a

fig 2.b