Coot, the flame is a max6 plugin (most max6 work with max7) called Partical Combustion. its a free flame and smoke plugin for max6 and 7. If you want I can put it on my website since its a freeware. all the designer ask is you give him credit in your films.
this was my first try so i can do a better job.
Yeah, the rocket will need to pick up speed a bit. my first goal is to use google earth to take prnt-scn small sections of florida, then paste them together to make a huge map of the region. that in itself is a project that will take many hours.
also, the free version of google has city names and other text popping out at you. I will need to maybe use a clone tool in PSP to remove or touch up so you dont see them.
Also, though it wont be commercial, I would probably send them an email asking if I can use it in my scene.
I never thought of using noise modifer to apply to a camera. does that even work? Paint shop pros "animation shop" comes with a really cool "Camera shake" tool that you can adjust. you just select the frames you want and apply different parameter values to them to create the shake. I think its the most realistic of all the camera shakes I have. I can then bring it into max or AE or vegas and add motion blur to make it more realistic.
its kind of cheating, but I notice that almost all 3D artist will help mask the 3D model look with some blur, atmosphere and shake to give it a much more realistic look. If I didnt have camera blur (FOV) attached to the ground, it would have looked alot faker.
Another trick is doing a night launch and adding spotlights and shadows. I think they did that in Deep Impact.
