Hey all. I need some help with a desert image. I want to make a close-shot image of a sandstorm/dust devil thing, like in the Mummy, where the guy transforms into the sand twister, but a still image. I've tried primitives mapped with transparent textures, fuzzy textures, many different things, but everything comes out pretty mediocre. The image shown is what I've done so far, after heavy postwork. As you can see - not so great. Does anyone have a method for doing this kind of thing they'd like to share?

"Walk down the right back alley in Sin City, and you can find anything."

You may want to check out the posts about making clouds. Seems similar. Try metacubes in Vue, like the way they make clouds from those.

I used a very clever trick for sand. Bought the rust material package from BountifulKnight here in the marketplace. Part of that is a procedural sand material that i always use for my alien scenes.

One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.

Thanks you two

"Walk down the right back alley in Sin City, and you can find anything."

This is a volumetric smoke mat I'm working on, applied to a cone. I'll post a link to the mat if you're interested.

Another attempt using metablobs, mat looks better but maybe too much like smoke?

Hell yeah, I'm interested! That's incredible volumetrics! Those metablobs are great as well, did you use the same material for both the cone and the blobs? Do tell :)

"Walk down the right back alley in Sin City, and you can find anything."

I've made a fairly convincing start at a campfire type fire material the same way - volumetric material applied to cone (base of cone on ground, that is). Pretty useful method until we get a particle system in Vue.

Which we really do need, by the way

"Walk down the right back alley in Sin City, and you can find anything."

Attached Link: http://www.jwhitham.plus.com/JWSmoke01.mat

OK mat's up at the above link. Yep, same mat for both images, I reduced the vertical wavelength from my basic smoke mat to try and replicate a twister, also added yellow to the volumetric colour.

The attached image just shines a very strong red spot up the smoke column for fire.

Well, that fire/smoke mat is the best I've seen here, "eons" beyond anything that shipped with Vue, and much better than the ones here. Very nice work, I must say. A bravo to you.

"Walk down the right back alley in Sin City, and you can find anything."

Great looking mat indeed. VOTE!!!

Now the bad news, Elminster_ZK has pointed out to me that this only works in Infinite.

As I think the Angle of Incidence input is the thing that makes it Infinite only, and that's key to getting the density without the hard edges, I can't see how to do anything about it. :(

Attached Link: http://www.jwhitham.plus.com/JWSmoke01.zip

And now it seems the file may get corrupted during download! So here's a link to a zipped version, hope this works OK.