Making Smoke like Particle system

SomeKid's picture

I am interested in making a smoke like particle system. I have searched kinda deep into some of the threads, and found some info. I read a great deal of george toledo sample thread. And got that I need lots of Interpolation and a particle system to do any thing remotely interesting. I think that is what I got, hard to tell. George you do a good job of keep your work yours. Which i can understand 100%.

But so my real question is do I need Kineme3D or QuartzCrystal to make smoke in Quartz Composer?

Am I thinking about this right? Small particles. Lots of them, I am guessing. Some gravity. A pretty short lifetime, or long lifetime? Do i need an image of some sort to make it look more real?

Help much appreciated

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Making Smoke like Particle system

http://www.quartzcompositions.com/phpBB2/upload/details.php?file=118

I remember thinking this was an interesting approach that I saw recently... (linked above). It amounts to a standard particle generator and a good texture. The one above is sort of funky in that it has feedback rendering enabled in the Render In Image's settings, but there is a clear patch, so it's sort of pointless for feedback rendering to be enabled, and they left the particle system named "comets" or something (must have been adapted from something else?). It looks fair, but it isn't necessarily 100% on point.

There are many different types of smoke looks, and whether or not it needs to be 3d or if it could be 2d might effect your approach. For a traditional legitimate "offline" approach, lots of particles might be cool, but with realtime animation you are better off to have more "particles" built into your texture image, so that you seemingly have many more particles than you are truly generating with the particle systems.

If you don't need to navigate around, and it can just be "2D" then you can use stuff like the accumulator patch to make a cool haze that can amp up smokiness... the GL Tools plugin has some examples, one of which is called "GL Tools - Spline Feedback". That has a good example of how to hook up an accumulator (you won't need the Bayer Dither though, and you probably want to hook the pixel w/h of the accumulator to an image dimensions, which should be hooked to whatever your source image is).

SomeKid's picture
Thank you

Thank you sir. Greatly appreciated.

I will look into the link and explore some of the ideas you suggested.