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Hello

I would like to know how to play with cinema praticles maxwell tags to achieve a smoke effect. I was trying to add maxwell tags to Cinema partice object but the final result is only grey balls. What I'm doing wrong ? I can't render a soft "smoke" balls with good interaction between they.

Regards
Neb

you will need quiet a lot of particles to get something convincing..

here an old render.. there was 2 million particles.. then play with the settings.. (giving you my setting would not be useful, because each particle cloud needs different settings..)

Basically, Cinema generates a set of 3D points, and for each one, Maxwell creates a sphere; to control the size of the spheres, you would use the Particle Radius value in the Maxwell Particles tag. To control the look of the spheres, you would use the material assigned to the particles object.

Additionally, you can have Maxwell generate more than one particle, for each particle generated by Cinema; you control the number of extra particles generated, and how they are distributed, with the Quantity, Dispersion, and Deformation values in the Extra Particles Per Particle section of the Maxwell Particles tag. Using those parameters, you can take a relatively low number of Cinema particles, and generate a cloud with a great number of particles in Maxwell, which is what you would want to do if you were trying to make smoke.

However, a better approach would likely be to use the Maxwell Volumetric tag on the particle emitter, instead of a Maxwell Particles tag. When you use a Maxwell Volumetric tag this way, rather than Maxwell defining the volumetric within a box, it uses the set of points generated by Cinema.

Thank you very much for fast answer!

Please help me a little bit more. Hervé excellent effect! I have dream to achieve that quality JDHill thank you for your explanations. Ok here is my scene. It's a part o a huge project. I would like to achieve everything in 3D and steam above my sever too.



First question. Should I for good smoky particles create a smoky maxwell material or only default gray or white material ? Second question:

1. I add cinema particle emitter to a scene
2. Should I add only maxwell volumetric tag to emtter or also maxwell particle tag too ?

Neb

You can't use both a Maxwell Particles and Maxwell Volumetric tag on the same object; if both are present, particles will be exported. Regarding the material, I'm not an expert (like Hervé ) on actually using either particles or volumetric, but I would say that with volumetric, you are probably best to use a quite simple material, very rough (probably 100%), and experiment with different methods for modulating the transparency to see which has the best performance. Meaning, performance may be better or worse by obtaining transparency through the material (i.e. layer opacity) as opposed to by changing the volumetric parameters (density, etc).

Thank you very much JDHill. Playing with settings are smooth and easy I had wrong tags setup before. Works excellent and I like that new feature.
I attached two test renders.

a very quick&dirty test:



using the standard particle system (tp won't work with the recent plug-in version), particle count set to 10.000 (max. possible within standard particles system), small particle radius set in the tag (0.02cm in this scene but depending on camera distance obviously), "extra particles per particles" set to 100, dispersion & deformation both to 0.05.
material is a white lambert with 50% opacity.
your image set as a background and used for illu and reflection.
no comp whatsoever, just out of the box, for this testing purposes. if it is to be done seriously one would seperate the passes obviously.

behaviour of the "steam" would be the result of the forces used.

EDIT:
oops... too late

Wow! No, you aren't late Great test. Thank you. I think very helpfully is "extra particles per particles" option. I would like to try with lambert plus 50% layer opacity material like yours. Motion blur should improve a final result.