Stupid question - does an emitter with the smoke turned down to 0 clear smoke in the grid?

[joconnell]

Heya folks!

I'm doing some cloud stuff using your tutorial as a starting point but adding in a few extra steps. One of them is to use an animated plane for my emitter so I get a bit more softness on the bottom of the cloud. I'm animating the velocity down but also the smoke amount and I'm finding that I'm getting some of my cloud being wiped out. I take it if an emitter still has some outgoing velocity and the smoke has dropped to 0, it's emitting a value of 0 into the smoke voxels and thus clearing it out? So If I want an irregular bottom to the cloud I'd be better off leaving smoke at 1.0 but just animating down the outgoing velocity to 0 only?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Indeed, that's it - turning down to zero the outgoing velocity, or brush effect, or inject power, will stop the discharge, but while there is still any discharge, the channel values would be set as they are in the source.

Cheers!

[joconnell]

Thats good to know, thanks! With the idea of filling channels, can we do things like localized dissipation or temperature via maxscript or other sources? Again it's the usual thing of taking a sim and being able to adjust some localized areas of it!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, you should be able to do that via maxscript currently - using the a_getsm/a_setsm functions inside the OnSimulationStep() callback: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...lobalfunctions

Cheers!

[joconnell]

I'll have to look into things like masking by geometry then, we want to look at things like clouds going up to a certain height and then being hit by wind, kind of like what's happening to the tops of these guys:



Like it'd be brilliant to have a utility source where you could pick a mesh to use as an emission volume but have the value injected being something like a plain directional force or extra dissipation or the likes - it'd be handy for having sheltered areas of sims being affected differently too!

Everyone in the office is really impressed with how quick the nightly is simming too!