How do I fade smoke at the end of a rocket with afterburn?

[Morne]

Hi all

With the old particle systems they have a "grow for 'value'" and "fade for 'value'". But now with Pflow and afterburn I'm not sure how to get this effect. All works well with my rocket, smoke grows and gets darker as the smoke gets older, but how do I fade it away slowly instead of just dissappearing when the particle dies?

[Morne]

Nevermind I seemed to have figured it out. All I had to do was enable the density afc in noise animation rollout and set high value to 0.

[joconnell]

I read somewhere that when blur do an afterburn trail they never use the density options since they're quite slow - they do one render of the smoke with no fade out at all, then another render where they use the afc curve to go from a white to black colour on the smoke, again with no density animation and then use it as a matte in a comping program - might give you slightly quicker results in some cases.

[Morne]

Thanks John

I'll keep that in mind for next time. For now in this case it was just a small effect with 2 missiles and 4 flares and the scene render times are not too bad. I'm getting about 11 to 28 minutes a frame (including loads of proxied trees and bushes)

Also it's my first time using afterburn and it was pretty simple to quickly figure out and learn, but I'm sure I can do with a lot more experience and tweaking. But again, for now the results I'm getting is acceptable, well for my 1st time anyways

But for sure that tip from Blur will come in handy at some point...

[instinct]

Mind you that will render faster but loose detail. The reason why this can get so slow is that AB obviously has to trace farther into the volume as the cutoff isnt reached. So while it works it tends to look lifeless depending on the type of smoke.

Regards,
Thorsten

[joconnell]

Totally agree but might be handy if time starts getting short!

[percydaman]

btw, there's an afterburn forum for registered users.

[Morne]

btw, there's an afterburn forum for registered users.

I try not to use it as I've heard that forum sucks.

[joconnell]

Yeah it's not great - Kresimir on the other hand is a superstar very much in the Vlado mould. If you ever get a copy of fume, the cg fluids forum on the other hand is great.

[percydaman]

I try not to use it as I've heard that forum sucks.

ya i agree its not that great. but you can frequently find answers there that people have previously posed.

[Morne]

I've never actually been on that forum. Maybe I'll check it out...