Tornado help!

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I have to create a small tornado like smoke that spins and becomes into a human. I have never used particles in Flint, so any tips would be extremely precious. How do I create the set up for this effect and what are the parameters to affect so that I get the twirling effect?

Bytheway, I would like to especially thank Mike Seymour for the very useful tips I found on this site with mattes and chroma key.

Yours

Sofia.

[Keyser_Soze]

sofia wrote:

Hi all,

I have to create a small tornado like smoke that spins and becomes into a human. I have never used particles in Flint, so any tips would be extremely precious. How do I create the set up for this effect and what are the parameters to affect so that I get the twirling effect?

Bytheway, I would like to especially thank Mike Seymour for the very useful tips I found on this site with mattes and chroma key.

Yours

Sofia.

I haven’t tried this approach myself but a workmate of mine told me he came up with this solution way back when there were no fancy 3d departments that could take care of this kind of stuff.
What he did was to build the tornado “body” of several layers of bicubics or extended ones, don’t remember. He used paint to create dustlike streaks as mattes for the bicubics. Then shaped them to a tornado like form. I guess you’ll have to experiment with different colours of the layers to get a nice mix. When you think you have enough layers parent them all to an axis and rotate them. Use motionblur.
Something I thought of now is that you could try and “warp” your tornado layers to get a more swirly effect. If you do this with a deform node or if you bring it outside of action and use the distort node, I guess you’ll have to try what works best.
On top of this – to get the final look – use particles. I won’t explain how to master them but there is a guide here in the tutorial section that you probably could use as a starting point. And maybe some digging in the manual might do you good 😉 Here you’ll find the fxguide tip –> http://www.fxguide.com/fxtips-53.html
When it comes to the transform from tornado to human I think a clean plate will help you. That way you can warp the person and make a dissolve from him to your tornado. If you have the possibility you can shoot the person against bluescreen and put him on a slowly rotating plate. Use timewarp (with trailing) to speed up the rotation.That and some warping I think will make a nice transition from tornado to man. Hope that is something to get you started. Good luck!

[Anonymous]

Thank you for all the useful tips. I did follow the link you sent me and created a basic effect which I think I will have to adjust using funtions in order to affect the lifetime of the particles so that they start from nothing to a a full effect and then back to nothing. I dont’ know if I will use layers with mattes to built this into a fuller effect for now but I will certainly try it out to see what happens.

Thanks again,
Sofia.

[Anonymous]

Hi again,

I’ve used a light source for particle generator, rotated the axis 90 degrees to make it face the “ceiling”, and bring it into the frame from left to right using motion path. The problem is that as the tornado moves from left to right inthe frame, it moves sideways instead of vertically. It becomes vertical only when it stops moving in the frame. By sideways I mean that whereas the light is rotated 90 degr. on the x-axis from the beginning, supposed to be facing the ceiling from the beginning, as it comes in from left to right, it faces the right side of the frame and so the tornado is horizontal until it reaches the middle of the frame where it stops. Then it becomes vertical. I don’t know why. Any tips on that?

Thank you!!

[Anonymous]

hi

you could try with an accel line instead/in addition to other manipulators,
it should “drag” the particles along while the generator is moving

ciao
robert

[Anonymous]

robc wrote:

hi

you could try with an accel line instead/in addition to other manipulators,
it should “drag” the particles along while the generator is moving

ciao
robert

Thank you robert, I did use the accel line and made a swirling effect around the humans. I create two different mattes of the effect and used them in action with add mode over the humans which appear in the scene with a plain dissolve under the particle effect. I think this was the wrong way to incorporate the effect in the scene. I should use warping, as I was adviced, to turn the particles into the humans right? I didn’t have time to do that. I spent from 9pm to 9am to make this effect and apply it in a scene for 6 different figures with different colors. How long should all this have taken me, including to warping these figures?

Sofia.

[loops]

It’s possible to arrange a particle system such that the particles themselves become the image at the end, but it’s a bit tricky. You have to use a plane mesh and “explode” it into a spiral vortex, then reverse the result. It’s nice to have the colours of the person merge into the particles. I did this for a person-into-swirling-smoke shot and vice versa but it really didn’t work too well… Maya or Particle Illusion would probably do a better job than Flint.

[Anonymous]

loops wrote:

It’s possible to arrange a particle system such that the particles themselves become the image at the end, but it’s a bit tricky. You have to use a plane mesh and “explode” it into a spiral vortex, then reverse the result. It’s nice to have the colours of the person merge into the particles. I did this for a person-into-swirling-smoke shot and vice versa but it really didn’t work too well… Maya or Particle Illusion would probably do a better job than Flint.

Thank you loops, I’ll certainly try it it as soon as I get a chance.

Sofia.

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