This is a tutorial which will give you a brief walk-through of Particle Storm 2.0. It is important to get a feel of how Particle Storm works before digging deeper into the plug-in. As you are going through this tutorial, you may not understand all of the steps. That's ok; we'll go into more detail later. You should, however, get a feel for how the plug-in communicates with LightWave.

Accessing Particle Storm:
Step 1) Open LightWave (Layout). Start with an empty scene.

Step 2) Go to the Options panel and select Particle Storm 2 under Generic Plug-ins. If you get an error while doing this consult troubleshooting.

Step 3) When you select Particle Storm 2, the interface for Particle Storm should pop up.

Moving the Camera:
Step 4) Under Cameras click on the first camera instance. Notice how the current Camera is highlighted.

Step 5) Left click and drag the mouse around in the OpenGL preview window. If you hold down the "ctrl" key on your keyboard while dragging the mouse, you can change the direction that the camera is looking. You'll often want to move the camera around to inspect your particles.

Creating Particles:
You'll see a sphere shape in the middle of the preview window. This is the Fountain Emitter through which particles are emitted.
Step 6) Under "Particle Groups" select the Particle Group (the default name shoud be PGROUP). Click on the button for"Effect File Base" . A file requestor will pop up. Select a directory where the effect file will be saved. Name the file "MyGroup". Upon exiting the file requestor, you should see the full path and the name of the effect file next to the file button.

Step 7) Right click on PGROUP. A popup will appear. Select "Create Effect Object" from these choices. Immediately after, a dialogue pops up showing you where the file was saved. This is a .lwo file. It is a LightWave object file that represents the points the make up the particles. Keep a note of this path.

Recording Particles:
Step 8) Click on the Rewind button.

Step 9) Now click on the Record button.

Step 10) Hit Play. A PSM (Particle Storm Motion) file is being generated as the simulation is playing. This PSM file is saved as the same name in the same directory specified in Step 6.

Importing Particles:
Step 11) Close out of Particle Storm by clicking on the "OK" button.

Step 12) Open the Objects panel.

Step 13) Click on "Load Object". Load "MyGroup.lwo" that was saved in the location specified in Step 6.

Step 14) Notice that there are 1000 points in the object file. These points represent 1000 particles (the default number of particles). Now select Particle Storm in the displacement map plug-in selector.

Step 15) Click on "Options" to open the interface. This is the the Displacement Map plug-in.

Step 16) Click on "Load PSM File". A file requestor will pop up. Select MyGroup.psm. When loaded, information about the PSM file will be displayed.

Step 17). Click OK, and then exit the Objects panel. Make sure you are viewing in Wire Frame from the Perspective view. Move the scrub-bar back and forth.The particles should be animated just as they were in Particle Storm's own interface.

Rendering Particles:
Step 18) Go to LightWave's Camera view. Position the camera such that you can see the particles. A good setting is 55cm, -1.5M, -17m.

Step 19) Go to the Objects panel and select the "Appearance Options" tab. Set the particle line size to "Large".

Step 20) Exit the Objects panel and open the Camera panel.

Step 21) Click on "Particle Blur".

Step 22) Hit [F9] to do a test render. You should see particles with some nice motion blur.