What started out as a crowed sourced research project in finding out how to create a NURBS curve based on on a steady string of particles, later became the SmokeStrings Generator, which will allow you to recreate a smoke trail effect as an animated mesh ribbon.
a ribbon of smoke which can be used to create the popular “Light Trail” effect, a convincing cigarette smoke, or many other weird types of effects
Its author, Brent Forrest had been trying to come up with an effective generator for cigarette smoke, not sold 100% on particle sprite based emissions or fluid simulations as they didn’t really achieve the ribbon like effect that you get with cigarette smoke.
SmokeStrings will provide a SmokeStrings locator in the scene, which handles the emission and dynamic properties of the smoke, a control particle that can deal with collisions or extra field properties, and drag, which is a volume exclusion field that is attached to the SmokeStrings object.
The SmokeStrings in the scene actually emits two discrete streams of particles that are connected with a lattice of springs, one that controls the neiboring particle distance and the other that controls the width between the two streams. Then a soft body can be generated between the two streams of particles, resulting in a ribbon which can take on the dynamic properties of wispy smoke.
One slight caveat is that SmokeStrings 4 is set to a frame rate of 24 fps by default – this however can be changed by manually setting the “Control Emitter” Rate to whatever your current frame rate is.
Check out the SmokeStrings Dynamic Smoke Generator for Maya here.
SmokeStrings 4 features:
- Generate a dynamic “ribbon” like realisitc cigarette smoke
- Create funky and weird dynamic simulations, go wild and I’m sure you’ll discover more possibilities than I did
- Create a 3d “Light trail”
- Offer consolidated dynamics controls through the main locator
- Outputs poly mesh
- Attach to any object as a smoke generator
- Have as many emitters in a scene as you need
- Interact with any collision objects or fields you wish to include
- Generate ribbon at any size and thickness.
- Runs REALTIME (No scripts – all nodes!)
- Accept any mesh operators
- User Friendly! Just hit play and you’ve got Smoke Strings!
- Documentaion included