Need help simulating drifting snow

[Rowquino]

Hi,

I'm trying to simulate blowing snow, like in the video below, but am having a tough time. I'm emitting from scattered points with animated noise on pscale, density and velocity, and I'm advecting the sim with a velocity volume derived from a set of animated curves (to get the wavy motion of the snow). The problem is that the smoke disperses quickly and loses it shape, and I can't get any fine detail into the smoke however many gas disturb/turbulence settings I try (I'm using speed, derived from vel, as a control field). The pyro sim has no temperature field or buoyancy applied. In the reference the snow is fuzzy and keeps its shape throughout, and I'm stuck about how to achieve this. I've attached the .hip if you feel like taking a look.

Thanks

 

Blowing Snow Flipbook 2.mp4

Blowing Snow Ref.mp4

Blowing Snow Simulation 09-02.hip

[mestela]

I'm not a sim person, apologies etc... but this might give you some ideas.

Smoke sims will always go soft over time. Instead I'd look at the footage and go 'it looks like worms of volume travelling over a surface, with some volume traily stuff'.

So thats what I've tried here; make some lines, run them through pops so they scoot over the surface with some noise. Then rasterise those into pyro sources, and have them continually emit as they travel; the leading edge will be sharp, and you can control how the trailing edge behaves; shoudl it dissipate quickly, have some upwards billow, all that.

The end result is... well, not great, but its easily tweakable, which is always the key for sim work; lots of fast iterations can beat a big slow sim.

 

snow_me.hip

[Rowquino]

Thanks for this! I'll have a look through, it looks like a good way of approaching it.