Flare and missile trails?

[Morne]

Hi all

A while back it was not possible to use Phoenix for things like missile smoke trails etc.
Is this still the case or has things changed since then?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hello,

Can you give us more details on what the problem was? I'd say there shouldn't be a problem to do this now.

[Morne]

It was something like the grid of the sim being too large or something like that.

I currently have 3 situations. In the past I just used pflow and afterburn for this, but it would be nice to use Phoenix. Phoenix looks much nicer and more realistic.

1. Shoulder launched missile. Cam behind character and the missile flies to its target (could be 500m to 3000m away). Same reversed - the cam is at the target and the missile comes towards the cam.
2. Flare/Chaff deployment from aircraft. Can be 1 flare or completely empty the cartridges like with "Angel Fire"
3. Up to 10 smoke grenades fired from a luncher and it travels about 30m to 60m (also bouncing and rolling on the ground)

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, the grids would be big for such setups, so I'd recommend you use 'multi-pass' advection and the new 'massive smoke' vorticity mode (you need a nightly build at most 3 weeks old for that) - they will give you the best detail with minimal resolution.

Putting the camera close to one end of a long container might require to split the domain into two higher-res end containers and a lower-res middle one, and if there is no wind involved it might just do the trick. Especially if the camera looks through the series of containers, any stitching artifacts that might show up should be easily avoidable.

[Morne]

How far will the latest demo get me?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

It doesn't have the new vorticity and is limited on grid resolution, so I'd say it will be quite far from optimal.

[Deflaminis]

What if it was just a side shot of a rocket going across the screen? Any tips?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Pretty much the same - if you have to look at the whole thing at once, it will be a good old large sim container, multi-pass + massive smoke, 1 step per frame, and that should be it. If you need more rolling of the smoke, up the conservation, but a low value should do as well.

[wxyz]

This was about 30 gigs in HD, 300 frames

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hmm, the cache files are probably bigger because you have particles in them - they used to be hard to compress with the official 2.2 and the older nightly builds. If you are looking for smaller cache size at the expense of some visual quality, you can turn down the Storage quality param in the Output panel.

However, this shot looks very strange, can you share the render settings? looks like there's no shadows on the volumetric and on the particles, and it's not just that...