Particle System - Super Spray

Today we learnt about using the Super Spray Particle System to create smoke and fire. I have a good existing knowledge of how to use this tool already as it was used a lot in my animation last year. However, there is always room for improvement and today was good revision for when I need to use it again.

I started off by creating smoke. The particles needed to be facing so that whatever angle the smoke was being looked at from, they would always look the same. One thing that I learnt while creating the smoke was to cut down the particle quantity. By inputting the amount of particles manually (e.g. 200) the rendering time will be cut down dramatically. Render time was a major problem last year - it took a good couple of weeks for files to render, especially the scenes that contained particle systems.

Another part of the tutorial that links to the super spray is creating wind. I didn't need to create this last year as my smoke just attached to my object and the object's movement controlled the movement of the smoke, but having wind joined to the smoke will be an effective tool to use. It was a bit fiddly trying to get the smoke and the wind the right speed/turbulence as what changes on one effects the output of the other but eventually I got to grips with it.

Next, the texturing was dealt with. The opacity needed its own Gradient texture and there was also the pre-set smoke texture applied. Face mapping needed to be used as well so that each polygon had its own texture: this prevented the smoke from looking like it was made up of loads of square particles, which is something I didn't quite get to grips with when creating the smoke last year. As one of the new parts of animating that I have to work on is explosions, there will obviously be some element of smoke and fire with it too. However, I am going to try and keep these to a minimum, as even rendering this small part of smoke took about 30 seconds, so a whole scene full of fire and smoke would take forever. To finish off the smoke, I added a feature that allows the end of it to fade out, making it look more realistic.

Next, I gave the fire a go despite having a bit of a memory block on how to do this. Similar techniques were used, with the main difference being that the fire needed some more variation on the top part (it needed to seem thinner toward the top and the particles needed to appear as though they were 'flickering' at different times to each other). The result of this I think looks a bit too circular and not right, so I will watch the tutorial on youtube and try to extend the technique further and use the end result in the animation.