Can afterburn be used for things other than fire etc?

So I was thinking of getting it. Can afterburn be used for things other than fire and explisions?

Yes, of course. clouds as diemacht said, water fountains, dust, twisters, and many things that are related to particle systems.

Also there is another professional tool if you are looking for that is Nextlimit RealFlow, a standalone program that generates physicaly realistic particles and can export data to use in 3dsmax, maya, etc for materials and more. Also can calcuate particle force and more. but needs a lot of cpu power. It had been used in "Robots" and also "Charlie and the Chocolate factory" and recently in "Ice Age 2" and etc. You may see for more info.

however I would use Afterburn, not bothering me with my cpu much and not facing me with complicated calculations. maybe, in the future use realflow.

Ali, its not a matter of using realflow vs afterburn. Realflow is a fluids & dynamics simulation engine. It calculates particles based on dynamics a lot better and more realisticly than max can without heavy scripting or additional plugins (glu, rf). Inter-particle collision based on volumetric particle sizes, masses, air pressure, submersive pressure and all that. It is a very handy tool, but what you would use it for is to calculate the dynamics for the scene your are using, and then incorporate that into 3dsmax and then use afterburn on the precalculated particle simulation. okee?

As for afterburn itself, it is not generally used for fire. There are other plugins that handle fire a lot easier than afterburn can, such as phoenix and aura. Afterburn is volumetric and almost fluid based, so therefore it can handle everything that comes under those two categories, water, oil, smoke, dust, explosions, clouds, rocky outcrops, displacement (sortof) e.t.c. Afterburn works off particles, therefore most things that you would think to use with particles, you can use afterburn to help achieve a realistic look. What I have found is that it does actually reduce your render times to use afterburn. It creates the "puffs" for each particle which you then use the noise (or custom maps) to break up, model, conform, colour, light and display each particle. So in essence you can create what looks likese hundreds of thousands of particles with just one. Understand? Think of it as using 3d facing mapped particles. Cubes, Cylinders, Spheres, Metaballs and then adding density falloff and then customising its shape and texture, brightness and colouration. All very fun and I definately do recommend it. But not for fire.

Thanks guys, how is afterburn when it comes to rendering? I have a P4 that is 3.6ghz. Do you think that it could handle afterburn?

Yes, but for full detailed particles (realistic look), you know... It would bother you to some extends. I have an AMD 64 3000+ and still experience low render speed for high quality renders. But the result will satisfie you if you make quality a bit lower. changing the selfshadows off and decreasing the noise detail level may help. Cameron had posted a tutorial in tutorials section about explosions in Afterburn. Look it for more info.

@Cameron; Thanks man. Learnt something more. So, it'd better to learn more about realflow. any resources you would recommend? And I think must read your tutorial again.

aura = amazig for fire. unfortunately it's in closed beta testing that i didnt get into =( i was so good at it too!

Wow, thanks guys for all your help...Now to come with $500 to buy the plugin