Smoke Trail Issues

[James Hernandez]

Personally, I think it would be much easier to render the rocket without the smoke trail and simply track the rocket later in your editing program with a smoke trail .png animation/video.

[Michael Josefik]

Yea, I could do that. Though I was using this project as a learning experience and wanted to try and do the whole thing, or whatever I could, in C4D. I will do it in After Effects for now, but if anyone has any ideas on how to make the smoke trails work in C4D I’d still like to hear them to play around with in the future.

Thanks

[Brian Jones]

it is possible (with some xpresso) to get the emitter to follow the deformed rocket (the Point node can do that) but the rocket is moving so fast here there are going to be problems and some hand tweaking is going to be necessary. I tried with the standard emitter, TP and x-particles and all have problems at that speed – as long as you want the rocket to deform with the spline it’s going to be more difficult.

Usual rocket is more like this https://helloluxx.com/tutorials/cinema4d-2/cinema4d-thinking-particles/sub-frame-emission-with-thinking-particles/ and without a spline wrap you can make the emitter be the parent of a rocket (like in reality) and then keeping them together is easy

[Michael Josefik]

Thanks Brian, good quick video. What I am eventually trying to create is an improved version of this.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ7Eh8t14OM which was really my first attempt to build and animate a scene. I was just never REALLY satisfied with it and now I have some time to go back and learn how to do it right 😀 Mostly get some better lighting and camera movements along with making the smoke, grass and fuses have a more “realistic” look. Here is a test render I have been working on https://youtu.be/7VIlEwJSrqU.

I liked the bendy quality the spline wrap gave the rocket, but the speed at which the rocket is traveling might make it not worth the trouble in the long run.

Thanks for the advice, I will start playing around with TP. I unfortunately don’t have xParticles and cannot get the demo version working.

And again, I am trying to learn here so if you see anything else you have a tip on in that first animation, or the second for that matter, let me know.

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[Michael Josefik]

Not sure why those links arent working from the post, but if you copy and paste the URLs they should work

[Brian Jones]

with the cartoony look the spline wrap is a good thing – even more realistic it’s still cartoony by today’s standards. I’d do the hand tweak (which isn’t hard if you have the timeline up and select the emitter in the OM so you can watch it’s progress then it’s just a matter of playing with the F-Curve of the Align To Spline to keep the emitter inside the rocket, after it starts, so the particles appear right at the end of the rocket. Here’s a quick trial of that 8566_smoketrail1.c4d.zip

one spline with intermediate points set to uniform (makes following the rocket much easier) – note it is possible to stick the emitter to the deformed rocket with xpresso (using the Point node) but that just makes hand tweaking harder than an align to spline….

In the Imagine bumper spot the major thing I see is the timing of the camera move, otherwise it’s pretty good, I like the fuzes but it might be nice to have a ‘sparkler’ at the burn point. The camera move is off, I think, my first thought would be a cut from one (position) to the other right as the detonator T is at it’s highest point

[Michael Josefik]

Sorry, I thought I replied to this a while ago and just noticed that I did not. Thanks for the help and the feedback. After playing around with it for a while I found that I could not achieve the look I was going for so I am going to do the smoke in AE.

I agree with the camera move. I was never really happy with it.

Thanks again.