I’m trying to make a smoke trail on the wheels of a car, but I’ve come across an issue which seems to be impossible to fix at this point, although I would like to know if there is a workaround or a possible solution.
So basically, I have a particle system, parented to the bottom bone of each wheel, and as such it follows the wheel’s position and Z rotation.
The problem is, it seems like particle systems parented to fast moving rigs have this odd behavior of not emitting the particles consistently, which creates wonky results:
I want to stick to the particle system method for the smoke trails and I want to avoid smoke simulations at all costs, since they’re pretty heavy.
Animating each wheel smoke trail individually is also out of question.
I had a similar problem once. I tried using the smoke sim for fire & smoke trails of a ‘rocket’, but I couldn’t get the fire part to look like I wanted. So I tried changing the shape of the emitter and used a particle system as the source for the smoke sim. This improved the shape of the fire, but then I encountered the problem your having.
Basically, the particle system only emits particles on each frame. Would work fine if your car is doing a burnout, but it fails with a fast moving object because of the distance the car moves between frames.
The work around, I think, is to slow down the animation. Instead of 100 frames of animation, make it be 400 frames. Then instead of rendering at 24fps, render at 96fps, so the animation playbacks at the same time length as the original.
At least, I think that’s how it would work, but IDK. I never tried it. Instead, I used a procedural flame object to get the look I wanted, and the smoke sim for the smoke trails.
I needed a huge domain in my case and I got it work on my POS under-spec’d computer. If you want to see the video, let me know…
I decided to give up on the particle system idea. I did a smoke sim just like you did and it was actually pretty light on rendering, had to wait a little longer but atleast it’s solved now
