Smoke sucked into ventilation duct

Hey there I have a job to do where smoke gets sucked into a ventilation duct, like so…


ie it goes into the opening then up the cylinder.

So would I create a domain shape that follows the path I want the smoke to follow, then somehow make the smoke follow a path? Is there a tutorial out there that would answer my question? Sorry I’m a bit new to smoke.

PS this would be in Cycles.

Make a domain big enough to fit where the smoke comes from, and the chimney (however much of it you’re going to see). Use a force field (the basic “force” type) to pull the smoke into the chimney. You’ll probably want to add an outflow behind the force so things don’t pile up in there.

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Hmm got a tutorial for that cause I’m not exactly following you there.

Have you worked with the smoke simulator before? If you haven’t, the smoke drum tutorial is still a pretty good primer: http://blenderdiplom.com/en/tutorials/all-tutorials/327-smoke-drum.html

I have but only slightly, and I ended up following this tutorial

but I will check out your link.

But I’m seriously just thinking of using After Effects because Blender takes forever to render the smoke effect (unless I’m missing some settings to make it render faster compared to AE).

Smoke in AE is sprite particles, smoke in Blender+Cycles is a raytraced volume. Sprites are always going to be way, way, way faster. But they also won’t look as realistic.

True, but working for academics they’re usually more interested in their concept rather than realism.

Welcome to my world :slight_smile: