Section 2 - Texturing the Meteor
Now that you have the meteor shaped to your liking, you will have to give it an appropriate texture. You can create a rock texture easily in Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, or your favourite alternative but, because I'm in a particularly nice mood, I will give you this texture to make your life a little easier. Please bear in mind that this texture was entirely created following the steps of my Pattern Maker Tutorial, so take a peek over in that direction if you want to give yourself a more rounded understanding of 3D texturing.

Step 6: In the Materials Menu, click File > New Material. Select the New Material and, in the Attributes Menu, unmark Specular (it's a rock!) and mark Bump (again, it's a rock!).

The Materials Editor The Material Attributes Step 7: Select the Color tab and, in the "x Texture" option, click and select the texture that you have just downloaded/created. If it pops up a message saying "This image is not in the document search path. Do you want to create a copy at the document location?", just click Yes. You can edit the Search Paths at Edit > Preferences > Texture Paths later. Do the same for the Bump tab. Since we are using a coloured, basic, non-optimized texture to be a bump map, set the Strength to 100 or 110 (yes you can set the % beyond the slider).

The "Assigned Texture" Icon The Assigned Texture Attributes Your result (if everything goes ok)

Section 3 - The Particle Emitter
Step 8: We will now create a Particle Emitter, which will emit particles of fire behind the meteor object. Go to Objects > Particle > Emitter to add an emitter object. Adjust the meteor to make it look like it is falling, and do the same with the Emitter object that you just created. You might need to rotate it 90 degrees in the Y direction depending on how you created and modelled the sphere. Just to be safe, create a null object (Objects > Null Object) and drag all objects in the Object Manager into it.  This will serve as a grouping method, and allow the meteor and emitter to be rotated as one.

The Meteor and the Emitter Selected with Rotation Mode on

Set the Emitter size to 6.6m. Also, make sure the Blue Arrow (the Z Axis) is aiming away from the falling nose of the meteor so that the particles are sprayed in the correct direction. Now, select the Emitter, and take a look of the options available in the Attributes Manager. Yep, there's quite a few!

The most important options are as follows: The Birthrate Editor and Birthrate Renderer values control the birth rate of particles coming from the emitter. The higher the number, the more particles that will created in a given timeframe. The first option is the one that you will be seeing  real-time in the Editor, and the second one affects the number of particles you will see in the final render. I usually set both to the same value, but if you want a particularly large number of particles, you may want to reduce the Birthrate Editor value a little to speed up your view ports. The Start Emission and Stop Emission values state when the emission of particles will start and stop.  This is an incredibly important value for animations, and can even have an impact on static renders like ours. The Lifetime value controls how long each single particle will live, after which they will fade into oblivion. You can add a variation factor to randomize this number. The fourth value, Speed, is one of the most important variables in this section, and is the one you will spend most of your time tweaking to your own personal tastes.  Combined with Lifetime, these variables control the flux of your particles. That said, it's basic purpose is a bit obvious (it manages the speed of each particle). You can also set a random variation. In the Emitter tab, we have the Emitter format (Emitter Type) which can be either Pyramid or Cone. For round and smoother results, we will use Cone. The X-Size and Y-Size we have already set (6.6m).   The angle dictates the angle that the cone or pyramid will be "open". Since we are making a particle effect which begins with the meteor (the fire growing in it's back) and ends with smoke, this angle will have to be set so that the particles can "open" and expand it's area. I recommend you to play with these options. Really. Play. You can get great results by experimenting with the different possibilities. Before we proceed, increase the number of frames by selecting Edit > Project Settings from the main menu and boost the Maximum value to 900 (which will also allow you to set the Stop Emission value of the emitter to 900 too). Now set the Emitter Attributes to the values on the right.  These give us a decent particle birthrate, an appropriate speed, and a good flux. The angle is slightly open so the particles can expand themselves. We're done here! Moving on...

- Tutorial written by Elentor

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