Dust from tires-->particles?! How?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hey there,
I ran into a problem just now. I don’t have any experience with particles so it might be either a simple or an impossible task to achieve :smiley:

What I am trying to do is having an emitter emit dust particles so that it looks like said dust clouds stem from the tires of my car :spin:
Here is a picture, I am shooting for a milder version of this:
http://media.autobild.de/bild/F/08ebc92899012bf0f3a205a7054c0eaf_1.jpg

The particles should be parented to each tire emitting dust as the car follows the path of the animation. The front wheels will be turning and the emitter should turn in conjunction with the tires.
I tried it to solve it like so: Added a plane and parented it to the chassis, added a copy rotation constraint (rotation of the corresponding wheel), added a particle system to the plane.
The rotation and the parenting work fine but because of the parenting the dust particles are emitted from the chassis, not the tire :frowning:

How do I solve this the proper way?

And while I am at it: Does anyone have nice dust/smoke settings for particles? Or does anyone know a good and up-to-date tutorial for this?

Thanks in advance!!

2

Well technically the ground should be the emitter … or to be exact the patch of dirt hit by the tire … And you should parent that to the wheel not the chassis, which will void the need for a copy rotation constraint …

And sorry I don’t know of any good materials for dust … but most likely it would involve using alpha mapped images and using the Billboard visualization option in the particle system .

3

Hey,
thanks for your reply.

I finally had it setup so that the particles were emitted the way they should. The material though was very bad and I didn’t find a decent one for dust/smoke. There is a tutorial in one of the latest blenderart mags but that didn’t look like it should either :frowning: because of the billboard thing - it looked, well, like sprites :wink:

In the process, I got quite disappointed/frustrated so for now I’ve dumped the dust part. I instead am working on a street scene for the car --> no dust clouds :smiley: