I'm planning on making a tornado scene but can't get the tornado to look right by "patching clouds,4d clouds and fogs together". I'm trying to find out if I can apply cloud, 4d cloud or fog to partical emitter or fountain but can't find out in the manual. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

You can't apply those to a particle emitter. Though you can use a particle emitter to create a tornado quite easily.

Steps:

1. Create particle emitter, the Big Bonfire is a good preset to start with
2. Change the particle shape type to sphere for a billowing tornado or rectangle for a smooth whirling tornado
3. Increase the velocity to 8 or above and make the particles free.
4. Scale the emitter in assembly.
5. Apply a spin modifier on the z axis and increase the speed of the spinning to something to you liking
6. Apply a blur effect to the emitter of 4% with gaussian selected and high quality
7. Apply a smokey looking texture 8. Also add some 4d clouds with spherical setting centered at the base with the same spin modifier applied at a slightly faster speed and another one at the stop of the emitter rotating slightly slower color the clouds a dark gray to match your tornado 9. You can also add another emitter similar to the first scale it slightly larger and use the same preset and velocity options as the first one, just decrease the particle amount and make the shape a rectangle, apply a texture map and transparency map to the emitter that will give you a somewhat random looking "debris" 10. Render! Brian

Message edited on: 11/18/2004 07:53

I feel like an idiot.. I tried the steps but can't get the particals to show up in the render..

Yeah. Looks like in my showing you how to do something, I stumbled upon a bug. I think it might have to do with the modifier, I emailed tech support, and submitted the bug. As a work around, what you can do is manually rotate the tornado, and then duplicate the rotation keyframes so you don't have to do it repeatedly over and over. Brian

Give 2 or 3 seconds for the particle emitter create some particles and then start your animation or render your still image. If isn't the problem let me know.

No go..

How about if you use the Fountain Primitive instead? Stretch it up using the resize handles so it tall and thin. With gravity at 0 it makes a very good tornado. I'd have big particles and then shade them with noise in the alpha or transparency channel then add a little blur. You can add spin if you want but it still looks good without.

Mark

Message edited on: 11/18/2004 17:42

Finally got a decent tornado! Thankyou! John Morris

The particle emitter would give you a nice movement effect with the free emitter, I figured out the problem. Eovia said its a bug in reference with the z-axis raise the emitter slightly above in the z-axis and it will work fine.

Using falconperigots sugestion, with some volumetric clouds in elipsoid shape, plus a spline object with a dissolve modifier, all those crap in a spin modifier and blur.

Heres the animation:

Simple Tornado

Well, Im still learning... :-)

Thankyou guys for your help. noviski, your tornado looks cool! It will be a while before I can try these out as I just lost my harddrive and in the process getting a thousand dollars worth of softwares and keys recovered. I can wait to try these tips out!

Message edited on: 11/19/2004 13:58

Message edited on: 11/19/2004 13:59