CoP 3: Practical Development Part 2

After trying out a few liquid simulations I've now moved on to experimenting with smoke particles and see how I can manipulate them. For this I decided that instead of using Bifrost to simulate my smoke I wanted to see what else would allow me to do it with in Maya, so I used nParticles to create my simulation. I changed it up because I wanted to explore more into Maya and figure out what else it could do, so for this experiment I first created a 3D container from the fluid section of the FX tool bar doing this will create a very simple smoke trail than just floats upwards in the container. To make the smoke look more exciting I had to go through the attributes of the 3D container, which confusingly is called Fluid and within that Fluid there is a Fluid Emitter, and change some of the settings.

To make the simulation look like a sphere with a smoke trail being emitted behind it I had to change the density of the Fluid Emitter and make it thicker, I increased the heat of the fluid Emitter, and turned of the jitter attribute so that there was a smooth motion to the smoke. I then went into the fluid shape attribute and changed the base resolution of the container so that the smoke wasn't as pixelated (I think my final resolution was something like 300 pixels in the container), I then changed the dampening effect of the fluid shape very slightly by 0.015. Now moving on to the actual look of the smoke I changed the high density solver to all grids which sets all of the content method attributes on, after that I went into the content details and selected the density and changed the buoyancy to 0 and increased the dissipation to 0.35 just so it doesn't spread as mush. Moving on to the velocity I increased the swirl just a little bit to 0.3, I also added some turbulence to the smoke by increasing the strength to 1.4, the frequency to 0.6 which will make the smoke trail act more abstract and not just give it a straight trail. After that I just changed the colour to a yellowy brown colour.

Doing all of this made me add more of an artistic aesthetic look to the smoke, I wanted the smoke to look like it had some character to it so I made the smoke trail have turbulence to give off the emotion that it was scared/lose/unsure of where it is or want its doing there. I also animated the fluid emitter so that it had more character, I gave the smoke a quick motion to its movements to add to the emotion I gave it.

Analysing this I would like to create another simulation and tweak the attributes so that you can fully understand the movement of the smoke because I feel like the smoke trail has to much motion in it. However, I am very pleased with the outcome of the simulation due to the post production I did in after effects where I placed a background with a ramp and then added more atmospheric particles just to outline the empty space around the smoke.