Ring of dust

[outtacontex]

Hello Fellow Houdini Users,

I've been off the grid for quite some time now, but needed some assistance, so here I am. Basically I've done several effects, RBD, Missile launches/impacts, etc etc that I'd like to start adding secondary elements to (ie shockwaves etc etc).

So, I'd like to figure out an intuitive way of creating a ring of dust, growing and being pushed outwards fast. The velocity would be based on the normals direction. I've been contemplating to eventually rebuild a solver out of microsolvers, but I'd like to see what I can accomplish out of the box first.

Would it be better, in this case, to create a custom velocity field in SOPs? I'd also like a good amount of details in the rolling effect as the volume is being pushed out, which means introducing vorticles. Is there a way to have vorticles influence the outer most parts of the volume?

Simple hip put together as a test. It's 4:30am so forgive the mess.

dust_ring_test.hip

Edited April 23, 2013 by outtacontex

[outtacontex]

Oh, also, I'm ok with quick and dirty methods

[pelos]

you could put a torus as the initial emmiter. to make the initial circle, and then to make the dust move outwards,

A) using a metaball and a magnet.

making in SOP make the normals of the torus point outwards and use that as a velocity field (you make the torus biger and use the trick with a point node of tx1-tx2, originial torus into input 0, bigger torus input 1) and the source node will pick that up. then in you can multiply the velocity or in the source sop or in the source in DOPs.

[outtacontex]

Ahhh, good ol metaball/magnet force combo. Never would've thought of that. I will try this and post the results. Thanks!

Edited April 23, 2013 by outtacontex