PixelBump - Tutorial 23 - FumeFX Tornado 

hi there, sorry i did not notice that you have replied, maybe, I need to pay more attention to google notifications :) Anyways, I just wanna thank you for taking the time to reply and also for your very informative tutorial... actually, ur tutorial helped me a lot learning fumefx and how to make tornados...

+vann tedd I am NOT pixelBump :) anyways, here is my two cents: Maya Fluids is obsolete! It's toooooo slow to be useful , what could be done in hours in FumeFX might take days or even more in Maya. In VFX, it's all about speed, you won't be afford to wait for so long to get a result, plus usually you will need to tweak it and resim again. When I slow I mean two things: slow in simulation and slow in rendering. If you are just starting to learn Maya, I would highly recommend to switch to another tool (e.g. PFlow is a better particle system in 3DS max compared to Maya that will help you do better shots using FumeFX, you can also use Thinking Particles to do better shots using FumeFX in 3DS max...) Good luck :)

+vann tedd you got it almost right :) FumeFX has two related parts: A) a fluid simulator, B) a shader --> what that means is that FumeFX has a physics engine to simulate the dynamics of gases/fire THEN it uses its shader to create nice images corresponding to the physical simulation it did. FumeFX is NOT a particle simulator, however it interacts with particles in two ways: A) FumeFX could use particles as its source of smoke/fire (i.e. you the artist, create some particles using another application such as Maya, 3DS Max,... and then ask FumeFX to use the particles as its source --> Here you need a good particle system like PFlow or Thinking Particles, what I said before is that Maya Particle System is not strong, at least to my taste), B) FumeFX can convert the smoke/fire it creates to particles (visually this could enhance the look of your image, i.e. instead of having only smoke/fire, you will have also particles that you can render independently using 3Ds Max, Maya, ... --> Here you could use Krakatoa to render the particles created by FumeFX, i.e. Krakatoa is very good in rendering large number of particles) As per Houdini, I never use it, but they advertise themselves as having a complete set of VFX tools that include fire/smoke, water, ... Also, checking in LinkedIn you will see many Artists use Houdini as their VXF tool, so I guess it's a good tool. What I can assure you here is that Maya is not the right tool for VFX, I am doing one shot with it and it not easy to use and very limited. If I were you I would either test 3DS max or Houdini...good luck :)

Whew! I was hoping this would be what you were looking for.

Hi! As far as I know it started as a 3DS Max plugin and has only recently moved to Maya but it seems to currently run on Windows PCs. You might consider a dual boot system on your Mac to run Maya or 3DS Max on Windows and then you can use FumeFX.

Hello! Thank you for responding! Sadly, my computer is too weak to dual boot. But at least I now know it's only for PC.

Hi! I'm not great with 3DS Max but I asked a friend who is a Max user and he pointed me to this: knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-3720DC32-7B9E-4C4C-A709-B3EF12C1112D-htm.html That should get you the same type of spline that we were using in Maya. Good luck!

Thanx

Holy crap! You have seriously made my day. I love your work and if I stumbled onto the same technique you used in Thor it makes me feel much better about myself. :)

haha thanks, try using your reference geo as an animated emission source. then use your particles as pure velocities, there by sculpting your density field. this gives you all kinda of options with speed while the ability to control you density separately you can rig up the splines and geo together.

Thank you for the tip! I really appreciate it.

np keep up the nice work