If you say so.
Hi Nichod!
Thanks a lot for sharing your blend file!!! some days ago I was crying to get a decent particle simulation. Now, your file has let me know some things I couldn’t figure out by myself 
After learning from your file, and using my previous experience I got this:
http://www.vimeo.com/1383987 (should be available in two hours, or so)
jedihe
That is true, most of the people involved with the cgtalk fxwar contests are either professionals or are using some powerful software for the task at hand. I think there was a good 15 people on the team I was on when we did the Rio project for the Big Freeze cgsociety challenge (And won, boom!) lol
It would be very cool to see what Blender -can- do though, not just to enter to win but to see the results of what is possible.
No pressure Brian… 
Glad to see you experimenting jedihe. 
I’ve moved on to some material tests with Particles. I’m still tweaking and learning simulations. But I wanted to get my mind around materials a bit more.
My first test is a simple billboard based material for a smoke effect. Its hardly “realistic” but it does have potential.
http://vimeo.com/1384976
Hi Nichod,
Nice smoke! how does the texture field work?
jedihe
Still working on that. Its difficult to grasp its effect. But once I get a handle on it I’ll elaborate.
Hi Nichod,
I just finished a tutorial for the french edition of the Magazine “Computer Arts” about making tornado in Blender. You can see it on my blog (in french, but the link to the video is at the bottom of the post) :
I described the technique i use to render tornado or smoke using billboards/sprites in the latest issue of Blender Art :
http://www.blenderart.org/2008/06/04/blenderart-mag-issue-16-now-available/
Animation of the tornado’s sprite is done using a single thin stream of particles moving up to the sky and childrens particles in “Curl” mode who turn around there parents (is this mode has been created specially for tornado ?)
I think my technic could be successfully merged with your curve based control !!! ;o)
Because my tutorial have to take only four pages of the magazine, i didn’t talk about motion blur, debris, or more details. But i think it’s a good start …
For anyone who want to read my blog in english, i just tested the “Google Translate” feature who seem to works fine :
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcoyhot.blogspot.com&hl=fr&ie=UTF8&sl=fr&tl=en
Very nice effect.
Hi CoyHot,
Your tornado is very, very nice .
BTW, have you tried to used curve-deformed-lattices to control the path of the particles? I think that way is possible to control the global behavior of the whole tornado quite easily.
jedihe
Yes, i tried to use lattice to deform the stream … but i think there are a little bug when you used children. Because if you add a lattice to the particles, all children disappear. I don’t kown if the “curve guide” have the same problem … ;o)
Yeah… as soon as you add the children option to the particles, they stop obbeying the lattice… must be a bug. Are you going to post it to the tracker?
jedihe
Just added :
https://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=17414&group_id=9&atid=125
Got textured fields figured out thanks to Jahka. And found out editing of baked particle paths is high on his list of priorities. No time table on it of course. But good to know its in his thoughts.
Here are some notes from Jahka on texture fields:
For every particle location we calculate the texture value at that point, the force in x direction will be proportional to how much the red value of the texture is over 0.5 (the force will be in negative direction if red<0.5) and similarly with y & green and z & blue
50% gray is no force at all… then just think of the color components as the forces at different axis.
Mini tutorial:
RGB values in blender go as floats from 0.0 to 1.0… 0.0 means negative direction, 0.5 is zero, and 1.0 is positive direction, so (0.5,1.0,0.5) rgb will give a full positive force in y direction.
For example, to get anyone started. Just create a texture. I used a blend and made a color gradient with both sides the same color. Make the color R=.5, G=1 and B=.5. Make an empty and give it a texture field with your texture as the source. Make sure to give the field a strength. Now create your particle system and give it no initial velocity. In this case you should see the particles flowing in the -y direction. Clear documentation coming soon.
R=X, G=Y, B=Z
Hi Nichod, Thanks a lot for the info!!! :). I’m playing with them right now.
I was watching a video some days ago and wondering how could I control the particles to move along some specific path but at the same time preserving much of the nice physical behavior of Newtonian Particles… do you know if it’s possible with the current state of Blender’s particle system? (I mean, using a setup that automates most of the animation…)
@CoyHot: Great! I also added a bug report to the tracker a couple of months ago… Ton fixed it, but… I had to bother him again, because the patch was not complete.
jedihe
Just got pretty much what I want!!! Here’s a preview: http://www.vimeo.com/1680979
Thanks for sharing the info about texture fields and RGB/XYZ conversion. That was exactly what I was needing!!! 
jedihe
