Help on slow atmospheric smoke

[zjie]

Hi, I need to do a slow, detailed swirling atmospheric smoke, something like this:

https://www.shutterstock.com/video/c...naCV9A:1:42/3p

However, from the result that I am getting:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BB...NCMdSGDFOoiyCH

1) I filled up the grid with smoke emitting from one side to the end, then I loaded the fill-up grid and add turbulence to it and sim again, is this the correct way to populate a grid? Because it is taking very long.
2) The smoke appears to be puffy, instead of wispy swirling as from the reference.
3) It does not appear in playblast properly so the only way I could preview it was to render it, I'm using Maya 2016.5.

Please advise, or maybe a more efficient workflow will be good too, thanks!

Zheng Jie

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

You could use a source in Volume Brush mode to fill a geometry, and eventually map the emission by a texture if you don't want it to be uniform. Also, a vortex force would also be useful in addition to the turbulence - you could preview its affect using the Force preview in the Preview rollout. In order to change the puffy look, try switching on and off Create Pressure on the turbulence helper and try out different Conservation methods.

Can you show me the issues you are having with playblast? We know that the zdepth won't blend correctly with objects inside the container, but this is how much Maya's viewport is capable of. Could this be the problem or is it something else?

Cheers!

[zjie]

Hi Svetlin,

For the playblast, when the smoke are of low opacity, the playblast will have bad bending issue.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Looks to me like Maya reduces the color precision for the playblast. Unfortunately Phoenix can't control that...