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Rendering smoke machine or steam


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Good day all

So I had a look and could not find anything regarding this topic.

What I am after is to show the smoke from the smoke maching without having the actual light beam and/or the spot of light where it hits the floor.

Just want to have like what you would see from say a kettle or cigar smoke or even water mist. some smoke hanging in the air coming from a smoke maching set inside a peice of truss and cladded by some branding.

I have tried to turn a light, set to spot, facing down to the floor, minimizing the beam, but get a hot-spot on the floor.

When shining out the beam is too long on none/smooth/realistic.

Maybe a different light mode/type?

The scene is set at night and a distant light like ambient, would hi-light this effect of the smoke hanging in the air.

I have thought maybe to use an image prop, but surely SpotLight/RenderWorks can do better.

For reference: I am rendering in vw2014 in a custom view, set in one Layer and using a custom Render Style with HDRI background. All settings for Lit fog is on, ambient lighting is off.

Any and all help appreciated

Keep Well

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It will be interesting to see if someone has ideas for you. From what I know about VW, this is probably well beyond the applications capabilities, but you just never know.

I have created pyro and smoke gags using image props with varying degrees of success. I would say they have never looked fantastic, but you can create some passable looks.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Not yet that I have seen. Most of what I have come across have either been combinations of image props or various setups using point lights instead of spot lights with lit fog enabled to get the glowing effect without creating a hotspot on nearby geometry, but these were very situational.

We currently don't have the ability to create/emit volumetric smoke as an actual object directly within Vectorworks. 3D modeling-centric packages normally create smoke as a physical object/substance with an Emitter, like so:

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