Smoke problems

[Gelco]

Hi there,
First of all, I apologise for my poor english, I'm a french CG student trying to be understandable

I'm quite new with fumefx, and having some troubles to make exactly what I want to do with. Maybe could you give me some advices ? I'm trying to create some foggy layer, with tentacles suddenly emerging from it (yeah, some hidden giant monster attack!). The interaction between tentacles and smoke works quite well, but I'm having troubles controlling the layer of dust.

Here is the last test render i made (video preview here), and the simulation settings I used. It's full of inperfections:


- Turbulence speed on the layer is way too high. As it's an underwater scene, I'm trying to create some slow and irregular waves on the smoke. It's not supposed to boil!
- The turbulence noise animation is a bit weird, irregular, with some shaky moves, as if some frames were missing. Any way to smooth it?
- Any way to adjust the smoke density ? (There's a "smoke density" option, but it's in the "Simulate fuel" rollout, and I don't have any fuel here).

Thanks a lot in advance,
Gelco

[Rif]

Any scene in 2008 ?

the key for deflection is Speed multiplication.. I also suggest you to use another source instead of the object , pick it in the source and Kill the Actual emition of Fuel and Smoke and temperature on it .. just use some Xtra Normal Velocitys to disturb as you wish .. we did plenty of monster attack stuffs like that on the Mist few years back ..

[Gelco]

Thanks for your answer Rif;
My source is actually not an object, but a "simple source" box. I already killed the emition of Fuel, and just added my tentacles in the Object/Src menu, for them to interact with the layer. By "Xtra Normal Velocitys", do you mean turbulence, or just Object/Directionnal/Radial velocity from the Object/Src rollout ?

I'm unfortunatly working with max 2009 (here's my scene)... but here are my fumefx settings :
General settings // Simulation settings // Object/Src settings

[Rif]

i know your source is a simple source.. i m talking about the Deflector , the tentacule of the beast\dragon tail wipping in the smoke.. to get xtra control on the DEfelction and how the smoke react , my suggestion is to NOT pick them in the Object\src rollout but to try picking them in a "neutral" new Object Soource with no fuel and temp just vel..

I dont have 2009.. maybe you can simply save an Fumefx preset ? hit save , and paste that .. its faster to try reproduce what you got as setup and scale..fumes is dependent on scale too sometimes

[Gelco]

Ok, here is the preset. And here is the ratio of my simple source, compared to the grid size. I'm going to try to add the tentacles to a neutral new Object Source, as you said.

[Gelco]

Ok, I just tried, and your solution of isolating tentacles in different Object Sources seems to work quite well. Perfect for adjusting the interaction -Thanks!.

I still have some problems to control the layer of dust itself (to slow down turbulences, avoid the shaky moves). I'm trying to play with speed multiplication parameter (adjusting tentacles extra velocity in consequence, to keep a nice deformation). Is there any other hidden paramter I could play with ? And for smoke density, is there a slider i missed (appart from the opacity parameter) ?