larryp7639

Ponge
I've offered to help a friend with a short film project that he's producing based on the after-effects of Nuclear fallout, and he requires me to create a mushroom cloud/nuclear explosion.

I've been playing with Pyro in my sparetime to approximate this, mainly with the fireball tool and keyframing several parameters to get a high temperature, fast moving initial fireball that is followed by a cooler ‘chamber’ of smoke, and while my results are looking okay, I was wondering if anyone had any other suggested workflows for how I could go about attempting this. I've seen some very complex solutions over on OD-force (which seems to be down as I write this) however these seem to be more focused on the static post-explosion mushroom cloud.

I'm mainly concerned that I'm missing a very obvious method or workflow to achieve this effect by sticking quite rigidly to the pyro preset. I have very little experience with the various fluid/gas solvers and subsolvers (although I would really love to begin to gain a basic understanding of these seemingly very powerful tools) however perhaps these could be used to gain more control over the various aspects of a mushroom cloud.

My other idea was that I could draw out the profile of a mushroom cloud with a nurbs curve, use a vop-sop to rotate the normals to follow the direction of a curve and then somehow pipe this into the simulation to control the movement of the fluids.

Here is an example that my friend showed me of what he would like me to achieve:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsTRxXvQY0s [youtube.com]

I think I could achieve this in Pyro, however as I say I would be very interested in hearing if anyone had any suggestions.

Many thanks,
Gary