Tornado

Artwork Blender Tests
1

Hey Blender artists! I am currently testing on a tornado effect using blenders smoke simulator. I used a particle system as a guide for the smoke.

tornado0175.png960×540 91.6 KB

tornado20202.png960×540 98.9 KB


However, as you can see in my render, the smoke renders in little separate balls of smoke to form a twister instead of just rendering as one single smoke twister. Can someone explain why it does this or how to fix this? All feedback is accepted. Thanks!

2

The particles are all emitting from their individual locations. Therefore you get a blob at each particle point, try increasing the domain resolution or use a different emitter.

3

Thx 3pointEdit! Ill try that but which domain resolution? Also, what will using a different emitter do? This is one of the very few times I’ve used the smoke sim so I’m little inexperienced

4

I’ve found that more particles emitting less smoke give smoother results. You could also increase the domain resolution. I don’t ever need more than 96.

5

So during the course of this week I believe I have managed to find results a little better. Here are some renders

tornado_betterresult.png960×540 101 KB

tornado_result2.png960×540 94.6 KB

tornado_result3.png960×540 89.3 KB

The only difference between these renders is the camera view. I’ve made minor adjustments to the material of the smoke. If you go to the materials then under the lighting section in the volume rendering type, you’ll see there’s a button that says shaded. I changed that to multiple scattering. Then I changed the spread from .200 to .600. I found that doing this will get rid of some of the shadow details in the smoke. Thereby, making the dots of smoke a little less visible and the smoke as a whole will look a little more solid. However, it is still a subtle change.

Edit: Also, I changed the density scale and scattering values from what I previously had which was .500 scattering and density scale of 1.000 to 1.000 scattering and density scale of 2. Doing this did prove to give some better results.

6

I did experiment with the domain resolution by making it higher. It actually makes the dots of smoke look a lot more visible. Although, I didn’t try using more particles. So I’ll try that!