Water?

I finally got 100 frames and decided I couldn't wait any longer. I imported the 'water' into Max and rendered this:

It doesn't really look that much like water, but at least the flow is realistic. To improve it I would probably just have to increase the number of particles and decrease the viscosity or something like that. I do know that doing that will MASSIVELY increase the render time, and thats time I don't have.
I don't know why it flickers though, probably a problem importing the mesh. Next time I'll hopefully have more time to perfect it.

Fire and water... (particles)

The next part in the tutorials was water. It showed exactly how to make a waterfall in Max using simple particles. Basically, it was just particles to show the flow of the river and particles to show the flow of the actual falling bit of the water. This is how it turned out:

This is a good method of making a simple waterfall (very simple for water) and I didn't have any troubles following the tutorial. Something like this would be perfect for water that's just in the background of the scene (i.e. not massively important or very easy to see). However, I wanted to know haw to make actual water.
So, I looked for some tutorials on the internet and found a rather nice video tutorial here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXbuiIXu8gY
So I followed this tutorial to make this:

This was a much better version of water, and I was happy with this. That was, until I heard about RealFlow. I saw some very nice videos on YouTube of all the amazing water effects you can make with this piece of software. So I thought I'd try it out! The official website have a download for a 10 day trial with all the features and I found a couple of videos explaining roughly how to use it. (This one in particular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZvPraO02E4&feature=fvw)
I think, so far I like it. I just have to wait for my test scene to finish rendering... ¬.¬

While I waited I made some fire in Max. After one unsuccessful tutorial I found http://3drockstar.com/creating-realistic-fire-using-particles-in-3ds-max/ which also had a material tutorial linked. My end render:

I was actually pretty happy about how that one turned out. I'm especially glad I learned how to change the colour of the particles through age.
That's all for now, hopefully I will post my RealFlow render soon. As long as my computer can stay alive...