| Creating
smoke using procedural textures |
| This is
very simple and quick tutorial, showing how to create
realistic smoke/fog using only procedural texture. The
main advantage of this technique is render time - you
can render a 1024x768 frame with nice-looking smoke literally
within five seconds! Compare this to the time you'll need
if you are using hypervoxels. What you can't achieve with
this shortcut is the effect of a moving camera through
smoke, but still you can partially simulate this effect
in your compositing program. |
User
level |
Beginning
LightWave User |
Tools
used |
Surface
Editor |
End
Results |
No
animation provided |
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| Create a single plane. The
size of the object doesn't matter, create it according
to what you need, but keep in mind that the size
of the procedural texture depends on the object's
size. In the Layout view shown the texture size
is 15 m in all axes and the object is 8 x 6 m. Position
your camera in the Layout so the smoke plane fills
the entire frame. |
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| You can leave the default scene
light as it is, you will not need additional lighting.
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| Open the Surface Editor using
the button in the menu over to the left, or by hitting
F5, and set the basic surface properties as shown. |
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| The Color and Transparency
channels should be set as shown here. If you wish,
you can change the size of the texture according
to your needs (larger values will produce lower
detail of the smoke — see examples in Step
3, on page 2). |
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| The two transparency layers
should have identical values, but the opacity needs
to be at 500% for the lower one. |
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