First of all, feel free to be as condescending as you like. I’ve been learning blender on and off for 2 years now, i’m 100% a novice still. If i’m saying or asking something stupid, just tell me.
With that, other than some pre-vis work (animatics for a commercial shoot), i’m about to try and use blender for the first time in a live project. The simple explanation is:
I have a big room, a warehouse. It’s cold. There is condensing col air running down the walls. Think fog machine. It’s creating a misty pool of fog all over the warehouse.
The biggest problem is that the smoke is acting more like water and less like air, the way it crashes into other bits of smoke and makes this massive wave straight u p in the room. I want to to flow over itself a lot more. I’m really unsure what setting(s) i need to tweak for this, I feel like I tried a combination of everything.
Also, the smoke is pretty thick and soupy, i’m fairly happy with it’s movement (at least before it collides with other smoke), but I definitely want it more misty. Is that a material thing or a simulation thing?
Sorry if this questions sucks, I could really use some help though. If this get’s fixed, i’m sure i’ll be back here for the rendering part!
Can you show us an example of a still of an existing photograph of what you want? (if you have one you were working on as reference).
A while ago I was modelling a refinery, with descending smoke all over, it was rather easy to do.
Create sphere mesh objects at the points where I wanted the smoke to be at.
Select all of them and go to Object->Quick Smoke
Then I had to adjust the domain object that it automatically creates, you may or may not need to do this but make sure it encompasses all the smoke inflow objects. Also note that the scale/size of the domain does affect the size of the smoke puffs (at least it feels that way to me, larger the domain the larger the puffs of smoke, regardless of what Resolution you set).
Next, select the smoke inflow objects, one by one set the Physics->Smoke->Temp Diff to a negative number to have it flow downwards instead of rise.
Note that the floor of the domain and its boundary (Border Collisions) setting should be set appropriately to what you want. Bake at low resolutions first to save time to get what you want.
I’m really struggling to find reference images! The way I describe it would be if you went to one of those big freezer rooms they have in restaurants. When you open the door, you get this fog all across the floor spill out, as it mixes with the hot air.
The best image I could find is something like this:
But I want it to be falling from the walls of the room, to not be so thick, and be creeping around across the floor. Right now my simulation is very aggressive, and the various smoke systems are not mixing together. Is this something to do with collisions?
Also, do you think it might be worth separating this into two different smoke systems? One for the floor and one for the walls.
I will have a play with the steps you recommended in the mean time.
You’re talking about a walk-in freezer. You might also see a similar effect if you open a household freezer on a warm summer day (i.e. the cold air mist that rolls out/down).
I’ve had similar problems with the smoke sim and multiple emitters where the plumes ‘crash’ into each other rather than smoothly blend for relatively ‘calm’ smoke sources. About the best I’ve come up with so far is to increase the resolution of the sim and # of subframes of the emitters. Seems to help minimize the effect but not eliminate it.
Also, you might want to dial down the vorticity of the domain so that you get more falling than swirling as it comes in. To get more of a misty, rather than soupy, effect on the ground I’d play around with the emitter density and domain dissolve settings.
