Car in a wind tunnel effect

Phoenix General
1

Hi All,

I’m a new user of Phoenix and have found myself in that classic situation, where I’ve been tasked to produce a realistic looking effect in a short amount of time, using software I don’t know that well :shock:

The effect in question is a car in a wind tunnel, very much like the attached example by the very talented Dabarti Studios. I’ve literally worked through a couple of the quick start tutorials but can’t quite get my head around where to start. Would they be separate emitters based on the cigarette smoke preset with a wind force to drive them, or maybe I use the path follow force to fake it?

Sorry to ask such newb questions. In an ideal world, I’d have had a couple of weeks prep time to try and learn the software, but I’m faced with trying to knock something out before the end of the week!

Any advice or pointers would be very much appreciated.

Thanks for your time,

Andy

2

Maybe this helps?

3

Thanks for the link Lasse. I did find that link via a Google search but initially dismissed it, as I couldn’t work out how to adapt it to my requirements (yes, I really need to experiment more with Phoenix, rather than bash around with it like a blind monkey!).

My main issue with the example scene was that I couldn’t figure out how to get the smoke to emit from specific points, or reduce the number of streams. I’m not blaming the software here, as I know the problem lies with my own lack of experience. However, I did have a play with it again last night and started to get somewhere. It’s not quite what I wanted to achieve but I’m hoping I can figure out where I’m going wrong. I’ll post an update later today, which might help illustrate where I’m going wrong.

Thanks again for the link, Lasse.

4

Can you share that scene? Now, that I have some time, I could make few tests.

5

Hi Lasse,

That’s very kind of you to offer to take a look. I’ve attached the scene file, minus the textures on the car. I’m only using it because it’s low poly and quicker to use whilst testing. It’s a 3DS Max 2018 file, with the latest versions of VRay and Phoenix. Please let me know if you need an older 3DS Max version.

Thanks again & all the best,

Andy
WindTunnel_v3.zip (148 KB)

6

I increased the grid resolution to 10 million voxels, changed the scene and grid scale. Things are starting to look better.
Smoke itself goes better than the particles - closer to cars surface.

I also made new emitters, but somehow I still don’t get particles from all of them. Svetlin? Any ideas why?
WindTunnel_v4.zip (204 KB)

7

Hey,

You have a discharge modifier for your Drag particles. You will need to tweak the graph or remove it and the particles will emit from every sphere.
You can also use Adaptive grid so the grid will be smaller at the start and reduce the simulation time quite a bit :slight_smile:

8

Ah, didn’t see it. Well that explains everything.

9

Thank you both for your help!

Lasse; thank you so much for taking the time to take a look at and adapt the scene. I’ve just downloaded it and have applied Georgi’s suggested tweaks. I’ll run the sim now and see how it looks… :slight_smile: