Automated Crater
Hello to all of you, here we are going to create another exiting structure within a minutes of time.This tutorial deals with when something may be say asteroid gets banged up on ground, so the impact of emerging and shifting of landmass creating a drive shift in dragging the land and rising them above the actual ground level.Here I will not be showing how an fiery asteroid enter Earth's atmosphere and bangs up the surface and explosion takes place. Especially when you ask any FX artist to create an explosion he / she would easily do it in no time. But if you ask them to show the after effect of explosion, they get stumbled. YES that sounds itchy. But no matter this is the basic one which we are going to do.Sculpting done in this tutorial is purely based upon bi-variant factor, a kind of technology which function are based upon black and white channel.
This tutorial can be done in any 3D application(s) out there. Only the mere fact is you should know the basic fundamentals of how bump and displacement mapping system works. But there are some limitation of this displacement system. No matter how powerful your system is.
Specially in 3DS Max you see there are few entities provided by Autodesk guys to uplift this kind of techniques.
- Displace Mesh modifier WSM
- Displacement Approx. modifier
- Displace modifier, and ,
- Displacement sector from Mental ray renderer tab.
So without wasting time we should get started.
Step - 1
1) Fire up your 3DS Max file from your desktop.
2) Create a new plane from create panel and amend this values in plane's parameters.
I. Length = 1000 Width = 1000
II. Length segs = 250 Width segs = 250,
III. while that of render multiplies remains intact.

3) Amending this may make you 3ds max a little shaky if your are working this tut on low speck system. So in order to get this thing work on your system, kindly enable "Adaptive Degradation". Now to make it enable the button shown below.

4) Open up your Medit (Material Editor) to give base color to our plane a.k.a. Ground.
5) Alright here our basic set up is now competed. Next step we are going to cover most of this tutorial actual part.
6) Save this file as Automated_Crater_Start.max.

Step - 2
1) Moving forward lets select our Ground and amend UVW mapping modifier to it. Just in case. Sometimes it happens that whenever you apply even a simple map that can be easily fitted over the entire system on model may show some wired result not only in viewport but also in render output. So make a habit to apply UVW map on your model.

2) No need to modify any settings from it. If necessary.
3) Again go to our modifier list and amend "Displace modifier" to our plane. Here we have to work on modifier as well as on Material Editor at the same time. So don't you get LOST. Anyways let's start
4) Selecting this Displace modifier change mapping system from "Cylinder to Planar" and check out he result in your viewport. And give displacement strength to 500, while rest of the modifier properties remains same.

5) Mapping system = cylinder
6) Strength = 500

7) Mapping system = Planar
8) Strength = 500.
9) Note:- Strength remains the same throughout the entire tutorial.
10) Alright we'll go one step at one time. So now just hide your plane and open your Material Editor. The main reason we are using Medit is , this Medit will provide us that channels which will finally give the shape we wanted in our final result.

11) One done this , we'll change this ramp in a new face.
12) It's time to animate our ramp. The only system from Ramp we are going to change is Gradient Ramp Parameters and Output while Noise and Coordinates will remain intact. Before changing ramp colors let us switch few values…
- Gradient type = Radial.
- Interpolation = Ease Out.
- Noise Amount = 0.15
- Noise type = Turbulence.
- Noise Size = 5.0
- Noise Level = 10.0, while rest of Gradient ramp parameters remain with no change within them.

13) Now let's animate our entire Ramp system. Gradient Ramp has 3 flags switched on by default at position 0 , 50 , 100 respectively. Now we are going to add more to it.

14) Now before we animate our ramp all those flags that we added up should be given black color. So double click to all flags one-by-one and give black color.
15) Now enable you timeline by hitting "N" from your keyboard.
16) OK. So we done , let's see further…
17) Bring all those manually created flags on left corner of ramp. Remember you can animate color changing to flag0 and flag 100 but they cannot be moved by any means. These flags are the producer of this ramp color system. OK now once your flags are settled , let's give them their new positions…..shall we then…
At Frame 0.
- Flag 1 = position is 0
- Flag 2 = position is 1
- Flag 3 = position is 2
- Flag 4 = position is 6
- Flag 5 = position is 3, see screenshot below for better visual…
- Once these all flags are converted from grey shade to black shade, it's time for them to get animated. Enable your animation tool kit by pressing "N" from your keyboard and follow the following procedures mentioned down…
- Flag 2 / It's position = 1 [ @ frame 0, value = 0 .ie still black color , @ frame 100 , value = 0 still black color but its position = 55] .
- Flag 3 / it's position = 2 [ @ frame 0, value = 0 .ie still black color , @ frame 100 , value = (R=G=B = 186) but its position = 65].
- Flag 6 / it's position = 6 [@ frame 0, value = 0 .ie still black color , @ frame 100 , value = (R=G=B = 176) but its position = 72].
- Flag 3 / it's position = 3 [@ frame 0, value = 0 .ie still black color , @ frame 100 , value = (R=G=B = 0) but its position = 94].
- Finishing our set up , we have got to problem here. Look at those edges, it's crispy and we shall fixe them right now. Go to modifier list and attest "Relax Modifier " to our model. What relax modifier here will do is , it will fix the edges properly. Some of you might add Turbo smooth and or mesh smooth, but that will increase the size of the file as well as the total number of polygons. Further may rise a problem which will create a little havoc in rendering this stuff and specially when talked about Mental ray.Just go to the Reax modifier parameters and increase the "Relax Value from 0.5 which is default to 0.75" while rest remains the same. No change.
- Save this fiule as "Automated_Crater_Finished".
- Below is the properties of our model right from construction till wrapping up our entire scene.

Let see here…

- Alright let's take a quick recap till how much we have covered.
- First we create a plane , provided a basic set of material and a map (gradient ramp map).
- Second we applied displace modifier and animated it's strength from frame 0 to frame 100 having displacement strength from 0 to 500.
- Third we fire up our Medit ramp and added some flags which will help to define our structure.
- Fourth we animated those added flags along with their colors, just from black and white channels to specific positions.
- Fifth we add re4lax modifier to fix edge problem.
- Well that's it for now, if in case you want to take this further, you can reverse this stuff like coating hole and suction likewise.
- You can also animate your texture here. No need to go for UV un wrapping and texture painting. For texture animation I'll strongly advise you guys to go for procedural texture maps that Autodesk default library is provided.
Note:- I have provided 3 files in one zipped file as "Automated_Crater_Resources"
- Automated_Crater_Start.max file.
- Automated_Crater_WIP.max file.
- Automated_Crater_Finished.max file.
You can open up any file and can see yourself the changes if you run into trouble.
I have added up some basic but old school method of lighting to act as global lighting environment.
Here is the rendered version with no external or internal materials or maps applied to it.

Here is the temporary render with few lights on
Please accept my apologies because the tutorial that I promised was volcanic ash/eruption from volcanic mountain. Due to my system was under maintenance and the computing power required to calculate all that ash or eruption was high so I came up with one of the above tutorial from my very own REM DVD and would like to share with you.
I do hope that after creating Volcanic Mountain, this is the simpliest entity to create in 3D using the same function and the very same procedure.