Rocket and Pod Sim

[hunter_williams]

The rocket smoke isn't showing up until the rocket passes through the pod and the smoke looks bad and it's very spaced:

I've linked the scene for troubleshooting.

[georgi.zhekov]

Hey,

Thanks a lot for the scene. Looks like your grid resolution is not high enough - your emitter is really small, while the grid resolution is low.

You can increase the grid resolution a few times and it should look a lot better.

[hunter_williams]

Thanks Georgi. Do you have any other tips/tricks to simulating larger stuff like rockets and flares?

[georgi.zhekov]

Hmm, you can check our rocket example scene here - https://docs.chaos.com/display/PHX4MAYA/Example+Scenes

It has some info on what are the important settings that make the shot work.

[hunter_williams]

Yeah I saw that tutorial and noticed that it's just keyframed for movement.

Is it better to keyframe a rockets movement as opposed to having move along a curve in Maya?

[georgi.zhekov]

Shouldn't make a difference - whatever works best for your shot. The faster the rocket moves - the more steps per frame you need, but more steps per frame usually make the smoke smoother and not that detailed (and make the simulation slower) - so it's best to use the lowest amount of steps per frame that don't produce gaps due to the fast movement when doing fire/smoke sims.