Giving 2D Steam Elements 3D Looking Shadows

Once I create a 2nd transparent material and change the Mat offset in the solidify modifier - I just get black. Anyone else had this?

Andrew Sutton

Hey Peter, I know this is an old comment but I wanted to give you some insight into some of the tools you mentioned. Going into another program like Embergen would just be a roundabout way of getting back to a card with steam on it, like Ian has already done. You could go into embergen, import the scene camera, and rebuild the lighting but again it's spending a lot of time to get a similar result. Simulating smoke as VDB is one of the costliest things you can do in 3D. It staggeringly increases render times and requires very large sim caches(gigabytes worth) to get the detail required. Wispy steam is also hard to sim and to get the photoreal detail required usually requires tools like Houdini, Embergen falls apart at smaller scales. It can also be time consuming to simulate in tools like Houdini. All that being said, in a lot of cases it's just better to take a card and slap footage of real steam on it :D

Dave Weinstock

oh I straight up have a procedural fire on my Patreon!

Felicia White

Nice. I've recently used the cloud textures and just plugged them into volume instead. It's not as crisp as 2d textures but was a fairly cheap way of placing some mist with some shape to it to a scene without having a harsh cut off where it intersected with geo.

I'm sure you've tried using volume shaders with cloud displacement; have you tried emitting them as particles (you probably have I bet)? Perhaps even metaball particles, although that might end up being slow. If you need more realism, you can get ready made VDB smoke simulations and use them in Blender. I copped it on here before for recommending Embergen, but with that you can generate realistic smoke or fire simulations in minutes and export it as images, spritesheets or VDB data which you could then use in Blender. I don't know that any of these suggestions would give you more efficient or better looking smoke than what you already have, but you might get smoke-like behaviour and lighting out of them more easily.

Pete Burges

Oh awesome! I was gonna see if this worked with movies of water

Felicia White

I plan on using this technique to do gas cook top flames for a project that I'm working on.

Shawn Hawkinson

Felicia, we are kindred spirits. I did the exact same thing for a project recently based on this same idea. It's pretty cool that you can take a tiny png or image sequence and get that depth and detail for free. Pretty cool stuff. Your result is excellent!

Shawn Hawkinson

You know the logic that got me here was: the parallax shader you had I thought, I wonder if I could make a volumetric hologram, and I totally did that! then when you mentioned this issue, it dawned on me I could just make it smoke instead. ALLLLLSO you could probably do fire the same way!

Felicia White

OH HO! Wow that works well!!! :D Thanks so much for sharing that!

Ian Hubert

Blenders modifiers for extrude don’t use the same texture coordinates so it can be quite painful to achieve

David McSween

This is really cool, thank you!

Govert Versluis

Oh, wow!!

it's that guy!

<3

Felicia White

Have you tried using the luma values as z extrudion depth-map? (I don't now if this centence make sense 🤷‍♂️ I'm an Ae kind-a-guy ... i don't speak blender😬)

Holy shit, WIZARD! I'm playing with your file and this is pretty amazing. Works perfectly from every angle, plays real-time in cycles and looks as good as anything I've seen...

Jostein Lie Svalheim

thanks Carter!

Levy Bergman

So I took this idea and ran in a different direction, I was gonna try and explain it but I just made it and a video showing it off. You can see it here https://www.patreon.com/posts/64619123 basically found a way to convert the image to a volume!

Felicia White

Hi. just wondering if your planning on making a video about matching greenscreen footage and cg enviroments? like the ”correct way”. Im using lumetri color on AF rn and its kind of working but there gotta be a better way.

alex

Like many of the things you come up with, this is something I didn't know I needed until I saw it. Now I think: why of COURSE I'll use this SOMEwhere now. Thank you!

"Modeling Sci-Fi Megastructures in Blender" https://www.patreon.com/posts/modeling-sci-fi-55161934

Carter Burr-Kirven

no you did understand me perfectly fine haha but i was just saying that when you increase the angle in the sun's settings it kind of feathers the shadows a little so that theyre not as sharp and crisp, thats the only other work around i could think of

Jay Gonzalez

Ian, let me ask where can I find that amazing huge parking lot tutorial with the buildings you posted a long ago? Seems like it's not here anymore :( Thanks, Levy

Levy Bergman

Or- oh! I may not be understanding you! What are you trying to do?

Ian Hubert

guess we'll just have to stick to messing with the angle option in the sun tab under the strength for now

Jay Gonzalez

Ah yeah! A lot of my tests involved the parallax shader! And it's possible there's something that could get it to work, but in general I ran into the same issue as with the steam; even though all the parallax stuff was working nice, once a shadow hit it, it would fall across it perfectly crisp/straight, revealing the whole thing was secretly flat.

Ian Hubert

did you try running it through that hologram asset you posted recently to give it that depth? and instead of emission give it that sss node? could that be a possibility ?

Jay Gonzalez

This is awesome and super helpful!

Mario Taylor

This one is crazy good. Absolutely stellar!

Jostein Lie Svalheim