I've been messing around with the particle generator trying to get some smoke for a "ship shooting a cannon" scene I'm working on. I started with the "Smoke" object that comes with C5 and did some heavy modifications.

(I didn't realize there was such a short time limit on editing posts. A few more thoughts:) A few lessons learned: When using the Alpha channel, less is more. Use as few particles as possible to acheive the desired effect. Rendering the Alpha channel is S-L-O-W. And if you use too many partciles, they end up casting shadows on each other and looking bad. The "size of particle over life" control is very useful. Use it. The shader preview doesn't render the alpha channel when using the Flat Preview. Try using the color White as your base Alpha value and do your mixing and experimenting in the Color channel. Then move the subshader to the Alpha channel when you have things right. A question: In the particle emitter, is there a way to make the particles shoot out to the side rather than straight up? With the smoke I did, I rolled the object over on its side in the assembly room. Then the Z gravity in the emitter affected the particles in the scene's Z axis, not the emitter's local Z. This meant that in the particle emitter I'd have to put the gravity in the Y axis when tweaking values and then move it to the Z axis to see it in the scene. (I hope that makes sense.) If anyone is interested in the shader recipe. I can post it somewhere. - Jasen.

Yes please. Post it here--? screen grab. In an exercise I have recently done, without changing any settings, just rotating the emitter made it produce to the direction I wanted--but I was not really sure of what I was doing--lots of fiddles and one of them worked!

bwtr

Does this answer your questions? If you click "bound to emitter" the smoke points in which ever direction you point the emitter. You can use the sizing tool to shape the emitter "box" to have the smoke in a varity of shapes and directions. I don't think you need to get involved with fancy gravity stuff? Or ?alpha stuff. I just changed the shader to an off white and left it at that--I changed nothing else of the emitter in vertex room other than those two items.

Message edited on: 12/17/2005 21:37

bwtr

(vertex room/model room.) ? change transperancy value in the Texture room to help with the density problems. You may be looking for something different ---I like to avoid getting complicated if possible (I don't understand half the stuff so I keep to the most obvious!)

bwtr

Please post your shader recipe. A screen shot of your shader tree would be great. Thanks

Attached Link: http://members.cox.net/jasenj1/SmokeTest.car

I posted the scene file to my web space. Do a "Save as..." of the file to your local machine. - Jasen.

Message edited on: 12/18/2005 21:20

1. Use the Smoke preset--as is. Set Bound to Emitter. 2. Change the shader to "Colour" (only), then change to an off white. 3. Size the diameter in the two directions to make it narrower/smaller in diameter.(Too small!) Hope you find of interest.

bwtr

Thanks for the file Jasen! Stan