smoke details

[Yannick]

Yup, when you use displacement, you need to set the Surface to a meaningful channel - in your case - to smoke. This way the gradient and surface displacement modes will work. Please have a look at the help link above, it's for 3ds max, but the only difference is that in maya there is no Advection mode displacement yet, otherwise it's the same principle.

Hi,
Is a 3d texture the best to connect in the displacement?
is the displacement following the smoke as it moves or is the smoke displaced as it goes through the texture?

Thanks,

Yannick

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

The smoke is displaced as it goes through the texture. The other way around was implemented in earlier versions of Phoenix, but it's currently dropped as it did not behave well.

In vector mode, you must connect a color texture that has color values between -1 and 1.

In gradient mode and surface mode, you can connect a monochrome texture, and also you need to have the smoke channel selected as an effects channel and to set the surface level to 0.1-0.5, depending on the thickness of your smoke. You can get a preview the surface over which the displacement will be applied if you change the preview mode to Mesh.

You can give the different modes a try and see which one best suits the dynamics of your sim.