An Amazing Jet Engine Exhaust Designing

You don’t really need anything in your scene but remember that any effect such as this shines when introduced in a nicely orchestrated environment.

1/4 The particles

Fire-up 3DS Max and maximize the Perspective Viewport by pressing alt+w. Pick a Super Spray object from the Create{} >Geometry{}> Particle Systems and place it in the middle of your scene.

Go to 3DS Max’s Modify tab {} and from the basic Parameters tab set the Viewport display to Mesh so we can preview our changes without having to render the scene. Also set the Percentage of Particles to 50%

Roll-out the Particle Generation tab. Set the particle Emit Start to -20, the Emit Stop to 110 and the Life to 6. Given that our scene has 100 frames we set the start and stop outside that boundary so it will look continuous. The Life value tells the particles when to die (morbid but accurate).

Scroll down to the Particle type tab and select Sphere. This will make 3DS Max’s Super Spray emitter generate spheres.

If you render the scene now you’ll see a couple of tiny spheres launching from the middle of nowhere. That being said, we need to increase the diameter of our particles. Go to the Particle Generation tab again and set the size to 30 and the variation to 100%.

We now need to find a way to make the spheres blend together to create that jet exhaust look. Scroll down to the Rotation and Collision tab and set the Spin Axis Control to Direction of Travel/Mblur and set the stretch to a value of 20.

It looks more like what we need now but it’s still a bit blocky. Go back to the Particle Generation tab and set the Grow For value to 0 and the Fade For to 6. This means the particles will start at full size (30) and will gradually get smaller towards their demise.

This is it for the particle emitter for now.
See page 2 for the material part
Open up 3DS Max’s Material Editor by pressing “M” and select the first empty material. Give the material an opacity of 1 and apply it {} to the Super Spray particle emitter.

You can render the scene now and you should notice we’re almost there. We’re only lacking some color. Click the Diffuse map slot and assign a Particle Age map.

The Particle Age map assigns a specific map to the particles until they reach a certain age. Once reached it switches to the second material and so on. Set the map colors to 3 shades of blue and render.

To most, this would be sufficient. However, we’re going to give it that extra Sci-Fi “pop”.
Open the Render Setup window and assign the mental ray renderer from the Common tab

Back in the material editor, add a glow map to the first map slot of the Particle Age map. Set the glow color to the same color you set the Particle Age map’s stage and the Brightness to 8.

Do the same for the rest of the map slots. (tip: you can copy and paste the color from the Particle Age map to the Glow map) and also tweak the colors to your liking. We ended up with this.

Render again.

3/4 The Glow

Looking good ehh ? Let’s keep our Cola stained shorts on and not get ahead of ourselves. The engine exhaust still lacks some punch. Let’s add some post-processing glow to the image.
With the material selected, hit the Go to Parent {} button to get to the main material. Click and hold the Material ID Channel {} button and select number 1.

Hit the “8“ key to get to 3DS Max’s Environment and Effects window and under Effects, add a Lens Effects item.

Now scroll down a bit and add a Glow effect from the list.

Scroll down some more (lots of scrolling in Max it seems) and set the Radial Color to two different shades of blue.
While we’re here also set the size to 1 and the intensity to 50. These settings are self explanatory but here we go: The size sets the size of the glow that will surround the exhaust and the intensity is … you get the point.

Swith over to the Glow Effect’s Options tab and un-check the Lights box and check the Material ID one. Make sure the ID is the same as the one you’ve set earlier on our material.

Render again and ignore the warnings.


So far we’ve gotten really, really close, but it’s still, no pickle. It seems that there are not enough spheres in our scene. The engine effect is generated by overlapping spheres. If we don’t generate enough spheres then the general opacity levels will be too low. Select the Super Spray and under Particle Generation set the Use Rate value to 30-35.

The particle emitter is ready for animation as it is but it will look much better with a couple of tweaks. Open up the Super Spray’s Rotation and Collision tab and set the Variation to 100%.

Render one final time:

After a few scaling tweaks, we got:

Morning After Thoughts

If there are lights interfering with the particle effect, just copy the diffuse map to the self-illumination slot or exclude the particles from the light.
You can elongate the exhaust jet by increasing the particle speed and you can also play around with the speed variation and Particle Formation to get some noisy jet effects.
The nice thing about this 3DS Max technique is that the particles animate correctly from the get go and it takes way less work to create believable space scenes. Another aspect worth remembering is that you can use deflectors to control the shape of the particles.
The only downside is the slight increase in render time due to the glow maps and large amount of spheres.