Particle Steam Help

#1

Im currently working on a project with a film crew and I’ve been asked to create a realistic particle steam coming out of the spout of a teapot, aswell as simulating steam as the actor lifts the lid.

Currently, I’ve tried using a combination of vortex, wind and in previous tests motor but the results im getting are uncontrolled and unnatural. I’ve thought about creating a collision path for the steam to travel upon and control rogue particles by having them delete on contact but I think I may be making something complex out of something simple.

Anyone able to suggest some ideas?

#2

Steam is usually fairly easy because it fades out very quickly. For something like that I would just stick with Wind space warps to apply some turbulence to the particles and not worry about vortex-like effects (unless you need something really unnatural). If you’re not too familiar with the Wind space warp, it can be a bit tricky. Do a search and I’m sure you’ll find detailed explanations. I’ll try to give you a simple setup:

  1. Make a Wind space warp and use it as a directional force (ie no turbulence).
  2. Make a second Wind space warp, set it to Spherical but with no strength. This is just to differentiate the two. Call this one TurbLarge01 and use the following values:

Turb 0.01
Freq 0.05
Scale 0.005

  1. Assign the space warps to your particles (Force op in PFlow) and play with the Scale setting on the TurbLarge. You should get very large turbulent motion. Matching this Scale parameter to your scene scale can take a bit. I usually start with very low values and work up slowly till I get the right noise pattern.

  2. Now keyframe the space warp moving upwards slowly over the course of the shot. This offsets the noise field over time, creating the idea of evolving turbulence.

  3. Once you get something that works, make a copy of the TurbLarge space warp and call it TurbSmall. This one should be physically located in a different location and use higher scale settings (like 0.015 for example). Then slowly increase the Turb values so that this space warp adds some fine noise motion to your particles.

Afterburn is your friend and FumeFX could be a huge help too…depending on how your shot is designed.

#3

Thanks for the help Brandon! Ill be giving that a try tonight.

Cheers!

#4

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