Quote - thd77. I have Vue 10.5. Can you let me know in more detail how you made the dust with your spaceship landing? Cheers

 

Sure. There are basically two parts to it:First set up the shape of the clouds/dust puff by combining primitives and if needed meta-blobbing them (keep in mind that you can animate the shape of a metablob by animating the primitives that its made from). Then you need to figure out how to synchronize the apprearance/disappearance of the cloud with your figure walking. I see two good ways to this:

1. set up a cloud group for each step. Then you can just animate them as the figure walks by. As the figure steps into the position, you raise the dust group above the ground level (from where it is hidden underground when its not needed) and then back under ground as the "dust settles". You need to carefully plan your keyframes to get it synchronized.

2. Set up one group for each foot. Animate them to follow the walk raising above ground and sinking back as needed. You will have to edit the time splines to get a good match between dust and figure movement.

To make it look believable you also need a good texture. Use a volumetric material and animate it. In the example I showed, I simply coupled the origin of the fractal that drives the volumetric density with time via a map filter node to control the rate of change. You can add more randomness by also adding an animated rotation.

Play with just the group of primitves and the material until you have something that works for you, then set up the big animation.

I hope this helps. If you have questions, just ask.

Ciao

TD