Listening Project Smoke Simulation

One of the big parts of the listening project I am working on is smoke simulations for oil fires and ashes.

I started out with the ashes, I wanted to create something that looked like it has some weight to it. I set the buoyancy of the fluid so that it would fall instead of rise and dissipate quite quickly. whether this is the effect we will go for or we will opt for a bigger, more dusty look still needs to be decided.

The next 5 images are my progression through rendering fire to full smoke columns in Maya. These aren't full quality renders but they are high enough to tell a good amount of detail.

This first one is quite basic, not a fluid effect but some simple built in Maya fire, it looks nice but isn't really the smoke fire we are looking for.

This was quite an interesting result that I am quite fond of myself, although its more of a small scale fire, so I moved on with my testing.

This test was getting more into smoke simulations that are textured and shaded to have fire at the bottom, which is more of the effect we are after I think. Because it allows us to get the small fire and huge black smoke column you see in Oil Fires. 

It got a bit to red and white when it came to shading though, and the smoke movement itself wasn't right so I moved on.

This test was about getting the smoke closer to a big column, it helped me learn more about the individual settings but tailed more into a floaty kind of smoke rather than oil fire smoke.

After all that testing and learning this is what I managed to create, I feel like it's really close to what we want, and I feel it looks nice enough to be a good addition to the Oil Rig scene. The next step is to get the final scene files set up so we can add in the smoke simulations at the right size and scale.

And lastly here's a playblast showreel of the different attempts to get the nice smoke column we wanted. Plus its nice to see some of this stuff actually moving, rather than just pictures.