Realistic steam raising, deviating because of wind and bouncing off ceiling. Can this be done?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
March 14, 2020
3 replies
583 views

I need to animate realistic steam raising, deviating because of wind and bouncing off ceiling. Can this be done with AE? Without plugins?

Thanks.

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R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

If you started with Fractal Noise and animated smoke rising you could all puppet pin to change the direction of the smoke so it went up then split in the middle and moved left and right. Add a track matte with a feathered edge to complete the illusion. That's the easiest way I can think of to generate steam or smoke rising and then hitting an obstacle and moving to the side using only what AE provides.

Trapcode Particular would do a much better job but it is going to cost you a fair amount of time to learn how to work the effect and a few dollars for the plugin.

R

Richard M Knight

Community Expert

Remember steam is invisible, you only see it when it turns to water vapour as it cools so the initial area above the heat source should be transparent.

Mylenium

Legend

Excellent point! That would also help to avoid having to animate some of the bits and pieces.

Mylenium

Legend

Depends on the situation, I guess. Without more specific information nobody can realyl answer that. Ideally a screenshot of the plate into which the steam needs to be integrated woulkd be most helpful. You know, it makes a difference whether you create thick, super hot steam from an engine or cooling tower or just subtle steam from a boiling pot or whatever...

Mylenium

Pistol2019Author

Inspiring

Here's the first draft.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAlefnbwPcM&feature=youtu.be

What you see is frost on a coil (plate) that's being melted by several heaters (in red). As the frost melts, it creates steam that raises and hits the ceiling. As it hits the ceiling, it turns back into ice. I used the Particle Playground effect to do the steam. But there are flaws:

1. The steam should come from the entire coil, not from a source below.

2. The steam should deviate to the left lowards the top because there is a small fan at the top pushing from right to left (I played with the Wall options in the Effect Controls, but to no avail). This is why you can see the ice forming only on the left side of the ceiling.

3. The steam should somewhat bounce off the ceiling, as real steam would.

Thanks.

Mylenium

Legend

Long and short: This is pretty much impossible with AE's standard tools. You might need to consider investing in something like Trapcode Particular or Stardust. Otherwise the only method I can think of would be using distorted fractal noise strips or such and bending it into place with Bezier Warp et al, but that could easily end up requiring 5 or more layers for each visible coil element because there is no way to have this as a single contiguous path. It would also be quite hard to control the opacity to look right with so many stacked layers and somewhere in there you may still need a stocck footage element of a billowing smoke to get the steam "bouncing" of the ceiling.

Mylenium

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