Smoke test without halos

Artwork Blender Tests
#1

I have tried to found solution to make smoke in blender, and this is one way to do it. I dont know has anybody tried this kind of method before.

Sphere used as particle object(dupli verts), and maded halo like material for it. Advantages of this method is that you can actually have shadows on smoke which is quite critical part to achive real looking smoke. You can control smoke behavior much better than with halos.
Disadvantages are huge rendering time and some artifacts which may shown when particle objects meets each other. With ZTransp, objects borders may get unwanted shading also(i.e Highlights there where should be transparency).

Well , enough talk. Just watch it , and give some C&C :slight_smile: : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLgPVp6B_Co
Hope you like it :slight_smile:

#2

Wow, that’s a good method. Well thought on using sphere instead of standard halo. Sure, there are some artificials, but in my opinion, they are not too obvious anyways and you only have to look hard for them or know that they were made out of spheres to know what artificials you were refering to. It could look realistic in the distance… perhaps you can experiment with that and see.

Only thing I hate about halo is that when you try to make a smoke like that with halo, there are a lot of unwanted artificials (shadows, etc.) on halo so it look flat or something completely different.

It’s a frustrating thing to do, but from what I can see, you’re very well on your way. :slight_smile:

#3

You could try to use metaball instead of normal sphere. It’s looking pretty good.

#4

I dont like halos either, when making smoke. One big thing what im missing is controlling halo size same way how you can control meshes, when using mesh as dupli verts in particles. If adding scale ipo for dupli vert object, it will affect each object separately when emitted. If increasing halo size it will affect every particle same time,

About using metaballs , it has to be done diffrent kind of material what i used to fake volumetric (dont know if its even possible). Im using nor mapping coords in alpha to have halo like material to sphere. When using spheres instead of halos you get 3 dimensional shadows to particles which is very important to have shadows if making thick smoke.

#5

I’ve been using this method for awhile, and here’s what I’ve discovered:
metaballs wouldn’t work, you’d lose the volumetrics without faces on the inside.
you can’t make the smoke fade out at the end like with particles/mat ipo. the mat ipo functions differantly with objects, they all fade out at once instead of across lifetime.

anyway, I learned this technique from rhysy2 (i believe) who learned it from one of the demos on centralsource, it’d been around but it’s got issues, I’m going to try out a node solution to the fade out though…

#6

Have you tried the using SpecTra slider? It can help here to remove highlights from transparent parts.

#7

Thanks broken! that improved a lot. Its quite funny; learning everyday something new about blender :). Just wondering , how i havent noticed that slider before :slight_smile:

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/9994/afterbeforegq0.th.png

#8

hmmm… I found a way to do what I was talking about, apply a blend texture (with colorband) to the streach co-ordinates and make it expand throughout its life with an object IPO, then, the bigger it gets, the more transparent it gets (or changes color…)

#9

My only issue with this is the shadow on the ground doesn’t take into effect the transparency of the smoke.

#10

My only issue with this is the shadow on the ground doesn’t take into effect the transparency of the smoke.

Do you have TraShadow turned on on your ground material?