swirling smoke

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

hey does anyone know how to make swirling smoke? ive been tryin to use softbodies but i cant get the effect i want. and im not very good using particles. if anyone has done this before or might have an idea on how to do so please let me know.

the smoke should look like the smoke that it trailing behind the bullet…o ya and it has to be animatable
http://img208.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bullettime5xl.png

o ya and does anyone know a better way to make abjects invisible or partially invisible without using the alpha bar. because whenever i turn the alpha down on whatever object im trying to turn transparent makes object behind it invisible as well.

#2

Rendering smoke normally needs volume rendering. povray/renderman will do this. Blender can be “tricked” into it, but its hard to get a good effect. And all the methods i just said are real slow…

#3

ah…well…would it turn out good? if so how do i go about volume rendering. or if ya got a better idea please let me know.

#4

theres a water tut that uses the volume method. Which basicaly a whole heap of alpha planes. look up some cloud tuts.

Getting the density to map to the real “smoke” may be hard

#5

ALpha particles can be used for volume simulation.

#6

and swirling can be now faked with many little wind effect, and maybe a texture as force…

#7

sorry if its a little late, but it depends on what you want, if you want glass, use raytransparency. but a much faster(albeit less realistic…depending on what you want) way is to use the alpha bar. just make sure you click ztransp and it’ll stop objects behind it from becoming transparent.