In this tutorial we take a look at the KludgeCity MEL script created by Edward Whetstone of WhetstoneVFX.com. This tool was developed as part of his short film project, "The Sum of Parts". It is open-source and freely available for anyone to use or edit, if you use it for your own projects, navigate to his site and donate some money. 

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In this tutorial first we will make lava using Maya particles and than we will study the process of creating lava inside of Realflow. We will also create Lava shader.

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In this tutorial we will use Channel Booleans tool to apply mathematical and logical operations on channels. We will cover following topics.

• Channel Booleans tool introduction.
• How to copy alpha channel of one image to its own color channels.
• How to use logical operations on the image channels.
• How to make alpha channel opaque or clear.
• How to generate object IDs from an image and then we will use generated object ID to wrap texture around an image using Texture tool.
• How to embed matte inside of an image to generate alpha channel.
• How to generate alpha channel from an image using channels.
• How to use luminance depth pass to generate Z channel values so that we can perform depth based compositing as well as generate effects like Fog and Depth Blur.

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