Hey!
Before I start, I apologize ahead of time for what might be a bit of a wall of text.
I have a pretty specific scenario on my hands right now - I'm trying to rig up a sci-fi space ship for pyro fx on the thrusters. I started by coming up with a proof-of-concept RND .hip file:
https://i.gyazo.com/114eb0b9cc794d7f9a61b54334972f57.mp4 [i.gyazo.com]
The short explanation of how the sim above works, is it's mainly driven by gas expansion and a gaswind node pumped into a sparse pyro solver. The only shaping outside of that is some slight shredding and turbulence, but as you can see it's overall a very uniform, regular shape and movement.
Now, when I got to actually rigging this on the ship, I realized this setup wasn't going to work - because I have multiple thrusters and each thruster aiming in a different direction. So, I decided to switch from using gaswind, to instead using velocity pointing in the direction of the geometry point normals. This is all up and running, and this is a hardware preview with that setup (blue lines = velocity):
https://i.gyazo.com/0aa0ab3779503717ece97ce182c941b1.mp4 [i.gyazo.com]
So at this point, you can see where I'm going with this - what my end goal is. I want to correlate the blue lines of the hardware preview to the original pyro simulation. The problem, however, is I can't seem to get anywhere close to the look of my original, gaswind driven pyro sim, being driven by velocity instead. Currently this is the look of my pyro sim being driven by velocity:
https://i.gyazo.com/ddc0068df39d5de672d718e16da517f0.mp4 [i.gyazo.com]
So, super turbulent. And this is with all kinds of noises or randomization turned OFF in the pyro source, and both shredding and turbulence turned off. Velocity is purely just pointing in the direction of the normals, which in turn is all pointing uniformly directly up on the Y axis. I just don't understand why it's being this turbulent, I don't see how velocity is that different from a gaswind dop node.
So, at this point I'm just stuck. Does anyone have any idea how I can get my velocity driven pyro sim closer to the look of the gaswind driven pyro sim? Alternatively, is there a way to use the effect of the gaswind node but in a limited area, so I can use a seperate gas wind for each thruster? Preferrably I wanted to keep all the thrusters in a single sparse solver for simplicity's sake, but maybe the only viable answer here is use the original setup but split each thruster into it's own seperate sparse solver, each with a different gaswind node? But then the question is how to rotate the gaswind direction with the ship as it's moving in world space.
I'm going around in loops but never coming up with a viable solution. Any ideas or input would be very appreciated!