I’m trying to animate a bullet moving through a barrel. I used Thinking Particles to get more control of the particles moving through the barrel. Then just used a standard particle emitter for the second muzzle blast effect. Is this the proper technique, or is there a more appropriate way to go about this?
Here’s a sample of how it turned out:
It looks fine, there are no right ways to bake a cake as long as they customers do not throw it back in your face. This is ALL illusion, I often feel I MUST do things in a physically accurate way and get frustrated why my fuel is not burning as it should and my smoke is not right and have a distinct aversion to just faking it all. BUT THAT IS THE NAME OF THE GAME. It is all “Smoke” and mirrors and it is what the audience see at the end that is important, as well as the workload, time to produce etc. You may not even need particles for the bullet it could work fine with a simple object emitter even just it’s base polygons. Odd you are working on this because I am doing a very similar shot but have put it to one side while I have been stress testing a new rig. I am about to start it up again tonight or tomorrow.
My TurbulenceFD Training
Thanks so much for your reply Paul! I figured this was the case. Not really any right or wrong way to do it, as long as as it’s believable to the viewers!
Not sure if you’re able to share a video of the simulation you’re working on, but it would be great to see the final result! There’s always room to improve on my end, and I’m still learning different techniques. There’s a lot of technical settings in TFD and there can be a bit of a learning curve haha.
Mine is a big project and should be ready at the end of May there will be a tutorial set that goes with it. I have been stopping and starting it and I find with TFD if you leave a project to long your love for it dies. I shall start from scratch now but have garnered much info in my testing. You see I have a new dual Xeon box which I have been stress testing and experimenting with team render. It is an old system and it’s dual 8 cores may just about bring it up to a modern AMD 12 core box. I have an old I7 6 core and this works out at roughly twice the render speed. It does however mean that with 128 GB RAM I can easily fall over from GPU to CPU and the dual Xeons chomp away. I would never have any real need to use all 128 GB RAM !! a 60 GB simulation is generally as good as I will ever need. So as I have another dual Xeon MB I may give it half of that RAM and buy some Xeons for a couple off hundred quid for it then i just need a power supply, case and drives, mouse and keyboard and I am away. The extra render power is great but what is more useful is that I can send a job to this machine and let it cook while I am doing look dev on the I7.
Oh that’s great to hear! Would definitely be interested in a tutorial on this 
Yes, I’m only finding myself using TFD about once a year, and end up having to re-learn the tools. It’s difficult for me personally to remember all the settings and how they work.
I hear you on the extra render setup! It’s certainly nice to have an extra machine you can offload some of these tasks to.
Your result is fine but it’s quite “handy” work. It’ better if you use fuel channel. That channel helps you catch fire from temperature or density channel then burn away. It’s more auto physical and may get more realistic result.
Hi Nguyen. I tried enabling the Fuel channel, but didn’t notice much difference. Of course I’m sure I’m not doing something correctly haha.
Also for my barrel and the muzzle blast, I am using two separate TurbulenceFD containers. Not sure if this is the proper technique, or if I should just be using one container?
I’d love to see other people’s result to this particular simulation.
Hey Paul, just curious if you had gotten any further with your bullet simulation?
Sorry been off the plot with a lot of family stuff the last few months. I will be back in the game shortly and will be working on Reactions but I have a project going with TFD and should have something to show by the end of the month
I have not kept the render so only have this test
I was basically testing timing and this was simply a fun setup test and in now way a final look
Wow this is very cool! Nice work!
Thanks but it was just to test. I now can get on with the scene I have been trying to do for some time, unless of course life throws more spanners in the works !!
