Lets talk about what I went through to get the smoke to this point.
TEST ANIMATION 02 - (4 MB QT7)
My original plan for creating a fluid smoke trail failed pretty miserably. What I thought would result in a nice looking plumey trail wound up looking like a jet engine farting out charcoal briquettes. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't really get it to look like much more than that.
So after reading through a highly helpful thread at CGTalk.com, I realized I may be able to pull this off after all by shading particles with fluids rather than relying entirely on fluids. The result was a nicer look, but now instead of charcoal it looked more like cotton balls. I created another emitter along side that one to spit out particles equipped with the particlecloud shader. By themselves, they don't look too amazing but mixed in with the fluid particles they helped to sort of blend the whole thing together and remove some of the disconnectedness of the fluid particles.
So now I've got a working concept of the smoke. My next move was making another particle system that simulated a blazing fire blowing off the front of the engine. I'm not thrilled with where its at right now, currently its just a few incandescent particles with a glow attached, but with a bit more work it should come along alright.
This past weekend I've been working on the actual plane animation. Consulting with a couple of professors on how I should track the scene has come to the idea that I should just do it by hand, so that being said there's no reason I shouldn't be working on the plane crash itself ten days ago.
The plane wing was originally tied to rigid body dynamics, but getting the wing to parent properly to the rest of the craft was problematic, so I decided that since the wing break would only be on the screen for literally 24 frames, hand animating it would probably work. The debris particles, while still kind of hard to see because of the shader attached, are created by a simple polygon instanced onto a particle system with some random rotation in there. I think it could use another emitter there to spew some smaller debris as well, so that's in the next update.
The fluids test is pretty gross. Fluids will be getting the most love considering its going to be responsible for the majority of the pyrotechnics, like the explosion and the smoke cloud trail. Right now it just looks like some sort of dust plume, and theres also some messed up glitches with the shading. The shadows passing through the cloud is neat, but its not quite what I need, and it doesn't look very nice with the motion blur on.
So, that's pretty alright for now. I think I'll go take a look at some fluids stuff and get back to the smoke trail. Maybe some extensive fluid tests for the next update.
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