Dust RnD

I've been working on the simulation for the dust that gets kicked up by our engines. Joey posted one of the earlier tests and since then I've gotten a working version of our ship asset into the scene.



The dust sourcing system is created by raying a point onto the surface and then generating a series of concentric rings that radiate outwards from that point. This is accomplished with some simple vector math in a VOP SOP and a voronoi noise VOP.



The next step was to create a couple point clouds with vectors on them that could be used to control the dust simulation. I used one in the shape of a torus to create a rolling effect as the smoke travels outwards. I also attached a cone of vectors that point down and out to simulate the actual thrust of the engines.



Finally this information was piped into a pyro solver, along with a primitive collision proxy for the ship. The end result is nice for a first pass. More updates as we incorporate the final ship animation and final environments.