I'll try to be as informative as possible. Many of you may be beginners and would like to know the best way on how to start animating, what kind of computer do you need for 3D animation, etc. This is where you'll find articles on the various topics.

I will be going into most of the major effects done in KB2. Included will be the gunfire flashes, the particle fire, the particle sparks, the Matrix-like bullet trails, and the "dead-time" shots.

The gunfire was probably the easiest effect. The way I did them in my much older short, Concussion, was paint a cycle of gunfire frames in Photoshop and then overlay them in with Premiere. This was too much work. Once Hash implemented the glow effect for objects, gunfire was a snap. All I did was model a gunfire shaped object, colored it yellow, set the ambience to 100%, and turned on the glow selection. I animated it by just scaling it up and scaling it down. However, as a safety, when scaling down, don't scale to 0. The model may become garbled (as of AM v7.1) when you scale it back to 100% or more. As a precaution, I always scale to 1%, small enough not to be seen.

Particle fire is much like the tutorial fire provided by Hash. The trick is adding more than one emitter material. On top of fire, a smoke particle emitter was added. The smoke was set so that it is transparent in the first few frames of birth, and then fades in. This gives the impression that the fire turns into black smoke as it rises. Also, the black smoke particles don't cover the fire.

Particle sparks are also easy. The particles are fast and short-lived. They were applied to a cone shaped object to give them spread. The coned objects are 100% transparent and the "cast reflection" properties were turned off.

Probably the trickiest effect was the Matrix-like bullet trail. In the movie The Matrix, it looked to be a moving particle emitter that instanced disc-like objects which refract. Animation Master currently does not have a particle instancer. Instead it has what is called a material effector. A material effector is an area of influence defined by a shape such as a sphere, cube, cone or cylinder. If an object is inside that material effector, it takes on the material of that effector.

What I did was build a cylinder that had ridges, giving it a look of many discs lined up in a row. I then gave it a transparent, refracting material. I didn't want to just move this cylinder across the screen. That won't really have the same effect as the bullets did in The Matrix. So I had to have the cylinder stationary and long enough to cover the entire path of the bullet, or at least long enough for the camera. That's where the material effectors came in. To give the impression that the refracting discs just appear behind the bullet and fade away over time, I had to use 2 material effectors, one to reveal the disc cylinder and one to fade it away. The two material effectors were, of course, 100% transparent and non-refracting. To reduce the effect on other objects besides the disc cylinder, I used cylindrical material effectors the same length of the disc cylinder. The first material effector followed the bullet's velocity directly, revealing disc-like sonic booms behind it. Then the second material effector followed one second or two later at a much slower velocity to fade the disc cylinder out.

Since the disc cylinder needs to refract everything behind it, there was no compositing involved. Everything was done in-scene. This caused problems, especially, when a bean dodges the bullet just barely. Since the disc cylinder is there at all times and is hidden by a material effector, the effector creates a nice hole in the body of the bean before the bullet flies by. For that, I needed a render patch of the bean by himself without any other objects. Then I can patch up the hole by compositing the fixed bean over the bean with the hole.

For the "dead-time" shots, rather than duplicating the multiple camera rig used by film studios, it's easier to do in 3D what they are trying to do in real life, which is to move the camera around while the subject is motionless. For my KB2 shots, they were created with 3 sequential shots. The first shot was a still camera that filmed the action up to the point of the beginning of the "dead-time." The second shot was a copy of where the first one left off and I simply animated the camera. The character was still and had no animation. The third shot was a copy of the second. The camera is still and the animated character finishes. The 3 shots were finally edited together in Premiere.

While Animation Master is not really the master of effects, you can definitely do some great FX work with the tools they give you. In my experience with AM and other packages like Maya, you always say to yourself, "Okay, I have X and Y tools. I need to get to Z. What is the equation needed to get there?" It's all a matter of thinking it out and a lot of trial and error. Unless you have a great deal of experience, you cannot avoid the trial and error process. It's something that is required by all 3D packages. That's what learning 3D is all about. Try out things for yourself. Sooner or later, you will develop into your own style.