Aura test 3

At this point, I'm trying to create movement in the smoke, instead of having the smoke stay put after emitting from the dragon. By increasing the resolution of the smoke container, a lot of the finer detail appeared, but at the expense of calculation and render time. The values of the sine function in the transform of the vorticle field were tweaked to amplify the movement of the smoke.

I also discovered that the guide smoke displayed in the DOPnet was inaccurate, a better representation would be the DOP import created with the smoke object.

Aura test 2

Aura Test

I'll be doing the aura for the dragon, so I did some tests using voxel fluids in Houdini to get the look of the aura.

Using a curve to control the path of the smoke:

To use the curve to influence the path of the smoke, I swept the curve with a circle, then made it a fog volume and scattered points in it. Normals created for the points on the curve using a Point SOP. The points were shifted using a Sort SOP and fed into the second input. This set of data was then used to make the normals follow the direction of the curve. I then created an attribute "v" (velocity), using the normals as the value. This attribute was then transferred to the points scattered on the fog volume. This set up was then fed into the DOP network via a SOPGeo. A field force and gastofield was used to create a field force from the geometry information. The field force then influences the smoke.


Testing with an animated object:

For this, a gas dissipate was used to make the smoke fade out over time. Turbulence was created by using a vorticle field. However, this was not satisfactory and I went into the node and added a transform, using a sine function to translate the field back and forth over time, creating more turbulence.