Looking for help on the best way to proceed at simulating dust produced by a helicopter as it’s taking off. I’m using 2.56a and sebastian’s free motion tracking files he provided at: http://www.vimeo.com/12196325
I’ve modeled a r/c helicopter, inserted it into the files provided, fixed up a few things and I got to say that I think I have a decent video so far, but it’s missing one thing. Dust kicked up by the rotor blades. If you watch the video linked above, it’s kind of centered around a ‘sandbox’. My toy helicopter takes off, flies and everything looks great, but for the dust that should be kicked up when it takes off or hovers close to the ground.
My first thought was the new smoke sim. I am having a hard time getting that to work in the shape I want and it seems a bit buggy to me. Not really buggy, but not working the way I would like.
So basically, I need to create a circle under the helicopter and have it shoot smoke or dust outwards from this circle. I think this is more a job for a massive amount of particles instead of the smoke sim. Or could I use the smoke sim with a force field in the center to force the smoke outwards from under the helicopter?
What would produce the best effect, smoke sim or particles? Which is more controllable? The video is on my vimeo channel, but since this is a WIP, it’s PW protected and can’t be viewed by everyone. If you want to see it just say so, and I’ll send you the info to access it.
Thanks for your time and any advice you may have…
Randy
Hey Benny_Flex, thanks for the response, but I’m not really sure how I’d make that work… could you provide an example?
I did spend some time learning the particle system, materials for them and even had to do compositing work to get things to work (I’m not good with nodes).
I am still thinking the smoke sim is the better route, but it really doesn’t seem to work very well. As an example, if I use a cube as a domain, size it as need, then add a place as my flow/emitter object it works fine. But if I change the emitter to be a circle, rather than a square plane, the resulting smoke will still be square despite the change in of the emitter. To cure that problem, I need to rebuild the entire smoke sim. Not very productive. Also, the smoke sim doesn’t seem to react very good if I move the emitter object.
Anyone have any better ideas? Or any insights on how to better control the smoke sim?
nice little chopper. Have been playing with something similar to get road dust effect for car. Attached a little file with a vertex and a wind to emulate the downdraft, a particle system with no initial velocity and the ground as a deflector. I had to reduce the emission amount to 100 to make it fit… bumping it up to 1000 or more gives a better simulation… haven’t bothered too much to tweak this, more for concept… as you often say an example is easier than trying to explain.
The force fields can be parented to the rotor centre, and tilting the force field gives a nice directional effect… also a mix of newtonian and boids for the paticle systems gives more flyers… .
I read Roubal’s page that was linked here, it’s interesting and might do the job, but I’m a little unsure as to how to proceed the achieve what he did. I’d have to research it further and maybe even contact him.
I rendered out batFINGER’s example and it might work as well, but I’d have to research that as well. I admit I don’t know the particle system that well and need to learn it. I didn’t pick apart batFINGER’s file to figure it all out yet, here again because of my lack of knowledge.
I’m looking for a way that won’t require me to research and learn things. Not that I have anything against learning new things, it’s more a matter that this has grown out of control, sort of. So in an attempt at finding a quick solution, I revisted the smoke sim today and ended up with pretty good results. I’ve just rendered it out and I’m waiting on vimeo to convert the file, and vimeo is acting a bit funny at the moment.
You see, originally this was just supposed to be an experiment at getting my feet wet in motion tracking. Then I decided to push it and see how realistic I could get it to look.
Anyhow, I’ll bump this when my new video is ready…
Thanks again, and if anyone else has any ideas, please share!
Doesn’t look the best in that video, but for the real file I’m working on I added a ‘charge’ force field to further help out the effect. Also in the file I’m working on, the helicopter is in a sand box so the dust created is basically the same color as the background.
I did have the helicopter come in low again later in the animation, but ran into problems with a 2nd smoke emitter starting at another place in the time line. Since I just want to finish this, I corrected the animation so the helicopter doesn’t get that close the ground to the ground, instead of looking for ways to over come that problem.
I’m currently rendering it all out (had half of it done, and realized I left the fame number stamp on…doh :spin:). Anyways, when I’m done, I’ll cut the .blend file down to size and post it here in case anyone else want’s to see how I did it.
