Combustion

Topic: version 4 MAXScript New Features/ Combustion

With the Combustion map, you can create maps interactively using the Discreet combustion product and 3ds max at the same time. You use combustion software to paint on a bitmap, and the material updates automatically in the 3ds max Material Editor and in shaded viewports.

Important: The combustion map works only if Discreet combustion is installed on your system.

You can use combustion as a material map in 3ds max. With a Combustion map, you can create a material from a Paint or composite operator, and in turn apply that material to objects in a 3ds max scene. The Combustion map can include combustion effects, and it can be animated.

In addition, with combustion you can import 3ds max scenes that have been rendered to a rich pixel file (RPF or RLA file). The imported rich pixel rendering becomes an element of your composite. You can adjust its 3D position relative to video elements of the composite, and you can apply combustion 3D Post effects to objects within it. See the combustion User's Guide for more information.

Note: Because 3ds max runs only on Windows, you cannot use combustion to create material maps on a Macintosh.

Note: The environmental atmospheric effect known as "Combustion" in versions prior to 3ds max 4 is now known as the Fire_effect.

A Combustion map is a 2D map. It is a combustion project used by the 3ds max Material Editor, so like any combustion project, it is vector-based, animatable, and fully editable. From within the Material Editor, you can have combustion create a new project from scratch, or use an existing composite or Paint branch. You can synchronize the combustion Timeline with the 3ds max time slider so animated materials synchronize with your 3D scene.

A macroScript has been added that gets called by the render management system to output render element info to the combustion(tm) .cws file format.

../UI/MacroScripts/Macro_CombustionOutput.mcr

Associated files include:

RenderElements-fns.ms

CombustionExport-fns.ms

Example:

C = combustion()