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View Full Version : using maya fluids to turn a building into smoke?

avd007
08-14-2009, 01:24 AM
hey everybody,
ive been working for about 3 weeks on a project in which a city slowly starts turning into smoke. as complicated as this sounds ive actually found a few ways that work ok, but nothing really perfect. initally i was trying a 2d fluid, but then opted for a 3d fluid and then used the paint fluids tool to take a render of the building and fill the space with fluid that matched the facade of the building. this worked great, except that the sides of the building are just streaks, so the building only looks good from one angle. i guess that what im asking is if anyone knows a way to have fluids turn from a solid building to smoke? any cool teqnuiqes or plugins anyone has used? thanks for the help guys.
-Alex
Jbocko
08-25-2009, 01:20 PM
I did something similar to this a while back. (This might be a dumb technique but it worked for me). I used overburn for Maya and had my building emit the overburn particles from surface. I used a texture (ramp) in order to control the emission of the particles and the transparency of the building. So as the ramp moved the building gradually went from opaque to transparent and along the edge of that change, particles that were attached to a fluid container were emitted to hide the opaque to transparent change and create a nice effect. I could also see doing this with the voxel master script (http://highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/dynamics/2096.html). Emit particles based on an animated texture that is also used to hide the building and use the emitted particles to emit fluid. The problem here is that, depending on the angle, you would see inside the building (unless you used a lot of fluid to obscure the view).



The other option for more of a magician's puff of smoke would be to do a simple switch. Render the scene with the original geometry and on the right frame make it no longer visible. Then on that same frame take a render of the building from that camera angle, use your technique from earlier and have it puff out. Not sure if this would give the look you wanted but it would probably be pretty cool.



Hope any of this helped.
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