Jet engine exhaust in Carrara
J MacKay
Posts: 0
Hello,
I'm currently working on a project where I am showing jets going down a taxi way. I am writing to ask if anyone might have any suggestions on how I might create the effect of the jet exhaust coming out the back of the engine.
The attached image was made in Photoshop. I was looking for a way to have an animated effect.
Should I be looking for a particle system or something done in post-production?
Thanks in advance.
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Comments
Seems like a fairly quick 'n simple effect to get by using a kinda cone shaped object trailing behind the jet with an animated texture on it.
Make a cone, tweak its shape a bit to make it more like an exhaust than a cone, then apply an animated texture that does some blurring of the background and has some heat waves and moves in the direction of the blast.
BTW, if you want to get fancy, you could apply a displacement map to the cone to give it some billowing jet exhaust blast type of animated shape. Cool.
Oooo, even cooler....
Apply a Wave deformer to your exhaust cone object, and animate the phase over your animation. Give it a few cylindrical waves, and it will look awesome. Then maybe add some more deformers for interest (noise, whatever...).
Here are 3 good example scenes to learn from, if you want to do this in Carrara:
http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/free/carrara-particle-emitter-scenes.html
A couple things to consider when choosing your method...
When you look at those cool photos/videos of F-14's taking off from aircraft carriers at night, you can see that the exhaust is more of a pulsing plasma type effect, very hot and very powerful. Kind of a repeating, pulsing wave of hot plasma. Not that you can't get something kinda like that with particles, but I think you might want something a bit different.
Also, one of the bigger challenges, IMO, is the shading. The effect you see is very much like heat waves rising off an asphalt road in the hot desert. Kind of a blurring of the background due to the hot air bending light.
So once you get the shape figured out, the key issue in believability will be the pulsing, blurring effect. In real life, that's due to the transparency of the air being modified by the heat and the burnt fuel, which changes the IOR of the air. Or something like that....
So I'd spend a lot of time working with transparency/alpha/IOR to get it just right, so you get some blurring, but also you can see the pulsing plasma effect.
The heat plume from a jet engine is an enlongated cone. The density of the heat distortion will vary with distance from the exhaust port. I would suggest that you start with an almost transparent cone at the exhaust port and increase the Index of Refraction greatly. Also, you'll probably want to apply some distortion to the material to provide for the wavering of the light. Follow the first cone with a second cone with a slightly less IOR but more distortion as the air particles will be less controlled by the force of the exhaust port. Then add a 3rd following the same method as the second.
Kendall
Yeah, I think a particle emitter is probably overkill in this sort of situation. But a semi-transparent object with some animated refraction would probably be perfect. You could also have part of it "light up" as part of the animation.
maybe this can adapt to your project.
http://www.markbremmer.com/3Bpages/DAS5smoke.html
examine the technique - you might even be able to make a heat haze !
Or you can try thinking on your own. Try to figure out what effect you're trying to get, look at some reference photos/videos, and figure out what's going on. And then if you're stumped, ask here.
It's really not that difficult.
Here is something I did, and if I would of taken out some of the dark smoky color on the scene where the F4 if at high altitude and maybe more of a BLUR that could of worked for you! BUT the F4 had a nasty habit of greasy smoky exhaust
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq7Faq6mMtc&list=UUtceKJM1WacqPjcTCtYJTwA&index=2
By the way my exhaust is a PARTICLE emitter with a BLUR applied. I was thinking of putting some refraction in the shader but not worth the render penalty.
ALSO here is a test I did for the gunsmoke fro ma 20mm gattling gun on my F4 and it would make a good exhaust!
Again it is a particle emitter with some smoky shader in it and a blur.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR0RynXSPCk&list=UUtceKJM1WacqPjcTCtYJTwA
Or you can try thinking on your own. Try to figure out what effect you're trying to get, look at some reference photos/videos, and figure out what's going on. And then if you're stumped, ask here.
It's really not that difficult.
Joe, that's a link to a tutorial. Made by a Carrara Pro (I know, you think they're mythical). It's a learning resource, not the actual file. By following a tutorial, it might lead to learning how to do something. I thought you were against people thrashing about without knowing what they were doing? ;-) <-- Smiley.</p>
Personally, I would probably look at a couple ways of doing it and either mix a couple methods to get my effect, or see which I liked better and then maybe using a post effect to enhance whatever the render was lacking.
this is a simple effect, done in bryce, should be duplicatable in Carrara
two cones, fully transparent, with a turbulence bump and displacement applied, Refraction is 101 for both cones (100 in bryce is air)
Here's a quick WIP image showing what I've got so far. I made an polygon object for the exhaust and applied a wave deformer to it.
I haven't quite figured out how to animate the deformer to make the shape "ripple"
From the effects menu for the shape I enabled the blur object effect.
The material was started with a preset material - transparency 1 -
I'll have to read up on how to make and apply animated textures to the exhaust shape
Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. They've been quite helpful.
For the wave deformer, you should be able to change the parameters over time. I'll see if I can come up with an example.
The same for the shaders. The extremely short answer to animating shaders is that if there are sliders, you should be able to adjust those over time as well. Just to emphasize, there are many, many other ways to animate shaders besides sliders. They're just the most obvious if your new to the shading room.
Like I said before, if you're using the Wave deformer, the "PHASE" slider will allow you to ripple it over time. And if you stack multiple Wave deformers on top of each other, you can get some very interesting rippling.
What about the fire primitive for an afterburner effect.
just playing around with it I got this
http://youtu.be/AyFlG4NRv4g
Could be much better with time and tweeking plus maybe some smoke
I've also had some good results using the fire primitive for jets. Albeit a little more sci-fi. ;-)
http://youtu.be/_SAQReh0ZYk
For these taxi scenes an afterburner effect isn't required.
Here's the scene with engine effect that I think works best. The key was making an animated texture for the alpha channel that included a fade out to 100 black on the left side of the texture. That way the exhaust shape faded to nothing at it's end. Another key was adding a blur to the shape in the effects menu. I like the way the exhaust blurs the front of the jet that's following it. I briefly played with a particle system, but it required a huge amount of render time and I really didn't test it out since the animated alpha texture seemed to do the trick.
https://vimeo.com/56505122
In working on animating the wave deformation - the wave seemed to start in the middle of the shape and work it's way out toward the ends. I couldn't see a way of changing the orientation of the wave. I clicked on the buttons for the different axis, but the effect didn't seem to change. It might make a difference how the shape was oriented when the deform wave was applied.
Again, thanks to everyone for their suggestions