animated train smoke

Granville

Can anyone give me advice on how I could create animated train smoke for a Daz scene. I am experiementing with Fluidos, but I struggle with the tutorials and pdf. Everything in the scene looks great. But it will be odd to be without smoke. Should I add it in post with After Effects + Particular?

WendyLuvsCatz

I would do it in post,using Particle Illusion but if you have After Affects even better!

TBorNot

The "smoke" is mostly steam, not cinders, so it's really a cloud being ejected under pressure.  Smoke can be from black to white, but light gray is the sweet spot.  The HD Volumetric Clouds turned on end is probably the closest.  I own a coal fired steam engine...  :-)

Alberto

Granville said:

Can anyone give me advice on how I could create animated train smoke for a Daz scene. I am experiementing with Fluidos, but I struggle with the tutorials and pdf. Everything in the scene looks great. But it will be odd to be without smoke. Should I add it in post with After Effects + Particular?

I can help if you have questions about the smoke.

Granville

I ended up using Simteneros Particle system because I need to animate the emitter.

Alberto

Granville said:

I ended up using Simteneros Particle system because I need to animate the emitter.

Seems good!

By the way, I did a smoke simulation with the same train model:

https://youtu.be/5pFzASNiCNo

ebergerly

Another option, especially since DAZ Studio now has a way to send scenes into Blender, is to use the incredibly easy and amazingly realistic smoke/fire/fluid simulations in Blender. This can also be added in post as the OP mentioned using After Effects, Nuke, or whatever works. There are many tutorials for these online, including some that show how you can generate an amazing smoke/fire simulation in just a few easy steps. 

BlueSirius

You could probably have the smoke on billboard(s) and use an image bigger than the plane it is displaying on then animate the offset during the animation. With a couple of billboards and instances of them you would have lots of puffs each able to animate to a degree. Instances can have different scales and positions.

So far I have done static smoke and steam using billboards with a diffuse and trans map for opacity.

There is an mcasual script MatAnim that I often use to animate opacity. This script lets you turn on animation properties for additional fields that are not normally animated.

Have a smaller than 1 value for the tiles on horizontal and or vertical then move the offsets during the animation, animating opacity is nice too, puffs could fade in and out using that.

Granville

I like the fluidos idea, I was unable to figure out how to use the domain and mesher when it is being transformed. The SimTenero particles are 3d and react to the train being moved through the scene. But as you can see, there are only a few shapes. The metablobs may not look smoky enough.

WendyLuvsCatz

I did a few in the past but not in DAZ studio 

Alberto

Granville said:

I like the fluidos idea, I was unable to figure out how to use the domain and mesher when it is being transformed. The SimTenero particles are 3d and react to the train being moved through the scene. But as you can see, there are only a few shapes. The metablobs may not look smoky enough.

Attached is the .duf file of the train smoke Fluidos II demo if you want to study it. Maybe you wisht to enlarge the size (z) of the Domain. 

It's easier to move the rest of the scene instead of the train, in the case of Fluidos. 

 

Granville

Thanks, Alvin. I am super interested.

Alberto

Granville said:

Thanks, Alvin. I am super interested.

You're welcome! If you have doubts, let me know.