I am trying to devise am “easy” way to control the period of time over which smoke is emitted from a flow object. The idea is this: I prefracture an object into say 50 shards and drop it onto a ground plane using rigid body physics. The object falls intact and breaks into 50 separate shards on impact. Now, as each shard contacts the ground plane, I would like to see a puff of smoke which would be setup to behave like dust. So, the emission should begin on contact and continue until some specified number of frames beyond coming to rest. For one shard, this is easy enough to do by setting particle start and end frames or, in mesh emission, animating the surface value from 0.0 to say 1.0 and back to 0.0. This is problematic, however, when 50 shards are involved - tedious may be a better word. I have looked into dynamic paint but it apparently can’t control particle emissions. For mesh emission it can be made to work for starting the smoke emission but not for ending it. Does anyone have an idea about how to proceed? Thanks.
I think dynamic paint is the way to go, can you post you .blend with your try or some images of the settings?
Thanks, I’ve been thinking about DP but have run into a problem. As I said, I want to drop many many objects onto a plane and have each impact cause a brief puff of smoke which would be setup to look like dust. Consider just one object. I can make it a brush and the plane a canvas and use the vertex group to control the smoke simulator. The problem is, I think, that there is no way to shut off the smoke once the object comes to rest on the plane. Additionally, potentially a hundred objects/brushes need to be setup which is a lot of manual work.
So, is there a way to make the dynamic paint completely dry up? Is there a way to setup hundreds of brushes by copying or some other technique? I will be happy to post files and tests but I think I am too far from a solution yet.
Dale
Maybe this will help you achieve what you want: http://www.blendernation.com/2014/10/27/creative-video-tutorial-fake-a-particle-reactor-without-dynamic-paint/