Can anyone tell me if its possible to create realistic looking smoke effects using Bryce please? I'm particularly interested in creating the smoke from a burning cigarette in an ashtray.......you know how it twists ans turns as it rises! If anyone can tell me how its done, or provide me with a link to a tutorials idreally appreciate it...........ive looked absolutely everywhere i can think of for an answer really :O( Many thanks

Animated or still?

Animated please :) This is where you tell me you dont know isnt it lol :)

this is the type of effect im trying to get.......this is a screenshot taken from one of the sample files that comes with Studiomax R4.

Animated smoke can be done, but (1) you have pre-plan like crazy and (2) expect to spend a whack of time in rendering. What you have to do is consider first how smoke moves and evaporates. It rises, increases in size, then slowly disappears as its size reduces down. What that means is that you have to build a series of primitives and then morph their size and position through time. For example, I built an animation in which a curtain changed textures behind a sudden explosion of smoke. I needed approximately 8 spheres to make it work and set them to rise, grow, then reduce and subsequently disappear in a staggered array. (Ill post some images later tonight to demonstrate what I mean.) All eight transformed over roughly a five-second span, and at 15 fps, it took almost two days for the frames to render, but the result was amazingly lifelike. The same can be used to create cigarette smokw; you could even set it up to be a running loop if you build it correctly, meaning whatever you start with is duplicated in the construction at the end. When the first set of smoke images is gone, the second will be in motion, and when you loop the resulting movie, youll have the appearance of a continuous line of smoke. Again, it is slow and tedious and you really have to plan it out, but it can work with amazing results when done. Look for the images later this evening.

Okay, heres what the constructions look like. Im only showing you the first four frames of that, versus 8 rendered ones, because the process is pretty self-explanatory after that point. Note that the "smoke spheres" are all hidden, set just below the "floor", and that already theyre set at varying sizes and staggered depth-wise from the camera.

And here are the eight rendered frames -- the first four match the four in the message above. Note that the smoke appears, coallesces into a single piece, then disappates as it disappears into the flies over the stage floor. All told, the sequence was 75 frames long and, as I said earlier, took almost two days to render. What complicated everything was the staggering number of lights used in some of the sequences: in this section, there are perhaps 20-25, all in motion. During one long shot of the stage as it transforms from a Baroque toy theatre into a high-tech rock concert platform, there are almost 50.

WOW! That looks excellent! Thanks ever so much for taking to the time to share tis technique with us :O)Ive printe it outand will try it later........not sure i can live without my PC for two days while it renders though lol What resolution did you render it at then just out of interest? It cant have been 320x240 can it? Cheers

P.S I forgot to ask yo somethin gelse too if you wouldnt mind :) Which material did you use? was it one of the one of the defaulsts in Bryce5? or did you have to create on or source one from somewhere else? Thanks.........again lol :)

The frames were originally 640 x 480. The material used was a stock Bryce texture -- I dont remember exactly which one, but its a grey cloud texture. It all depends on what kind of light is hitting it: some respond better than others to multiple light sources, while a few are more content with only one or two beyond ambient -- shortly after this, I tried doing the same thing to show a smoke effect for the war scene in Candide (the musical adaptation), and I wound up having to create a whole new texture in the Texture Editor. Experiment; thats the best I can recommend.

Thanks Man, much appreciated!