The director of the documentary wants me to build a 3D version of a turbidite (see video), specifically the last half where it’s shooting along the bottom. Since it looks like smoke, I thought the smoke sim might be best, but I can’t seem to control the smoke properly to make it work. Any ideas on the best way to go about this?
VIDEO:
The second half of the video will be be quite easy. The reason being that while there is a glass container, and the particles are traveling through water, because of the camera angle there is virtually no refraction or reflection of the glassy surfaces. In effect it looks like a dust cloud traveling through air.
So question #1 is:
Do you need the initial shot of the particles being poured into the water, and the water’s surface rippling outwards?
I just need the second part, and I doesn’t even have to be an aquarium. He’d prefer if I did as an underwater ocean shot instead. I just can’t get the smoke to shape and bend the right way.
For me you can sort of ignore the fact that it is poured into water.
It acts like a liquid as it is separate from the water it is poured into.
Playing around with the physics constants like the viscosity and gravity would give the minimum weight effect.
Then the cloudiness would be accomplished by a volume material to render the liquid.
Best of luck
Martin
This may help you or give you some ideas.
The smoke-emitter object is a closed cylinder with an endcap that matches the rounded shape of the leading edge of the cloud video. It has many many loop cuts and a shape key that makes it much (like 15 times) longer on the x axis. There is a bezier curve which it follows, the curve looks more like a ramp and a flat surface like the video. The smoke emitter is keyframed (linear) on frame 1 and 150 for loc/rot and for the value of the shape key so that it is sliding down and moving right, but also expanding along the x axis.
There is a track object which is smoke collison that helps contain the smoke from expanding across the y axis.
I added a material to the smoke emitter which represents the thick particles in the center. You may wish to just make the smoke darker and thicker and not render the emitter.
Open the blend, select the smoke-domain, and go the physics tab, and click the bake button. After that hide the track, and maybe hide the smoke-emitter2 in the outliner and do some test renders.
Any questions feel free to ask. Good luck.
Thank you, everyone. Much appreciated! I’ll give this a go and see what happens.
Good luck, feel free to ask any questions about the blend I posted.
Thanks for the file, using a mesh as a base shape helped me a lot. Here’s my current result:
I’m getting there, but now I’m having a problem with the look. My smoke is too wispy on top and too rigid on the bottom. I’m using a wind and a turbulence field. If anyone could look at the blend file, it’s here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/foins3nokujrdva/Turbidite.blend?dl=0
Heads up, I’m using two displays, so the file will probably open with two windows. Just close the first one.
For comparison, I’m going for this look/texture in the end:
It’s a lot more rounded and smooth, while still has an organic, random feel to it.
It looks quite good, When I open your blend in 2.71 and 2.72 it is crashing blender hard. What version/platform are you on? Maybe try resaving and reposting the blend.
One quick thing to try is jacking up the contrast in the brightness/contrast node in the smoke material, that will tend to force the smoke to either “be there” or “not be there” and provide a harder edge and less wispiness.
Here at work I’m on a Mac trashcan and was using 2.73. When I crank the brightness/contrast up, It does help with the wispy stuff, but doesn’t smooth out the smoke. I’ve seen some amazing sims where the smoke is all nice and rounded, but I’m starting to wonder if it’s even possible for what I’m trying to do. The director may have to settle for close.
Just had a thought. Smoke rises, but sediment falls. Why not reverse gravity? Set gravity to 10. Now you need it to go up a little bit, so in the emitter you can set the emission strength to the normals, so why not make a lumpy emitter, or group of spheroids as the emitters, it puffs out of the spheres then gets pulled back down? Tilt the floor below it some, and make it a collision object.
I’m still not getting it. Been at it a week and now we’re looking to outsource this part of it. I have the rest of today to try to get it working. I’m wondering if simulating an explosion that travels along the ground like in movies wouldn’t be a bad way to go?
Tried to send you an email but it was rejected. I put together a new concept for the turbidite sim. Low res render looks like this: PM if interested.
