However, the down side of continuing using the FXtool is that, it doesn't provide much control and not really anyone here at SESI knows much about it. And I am so officially stuck.
If I jump on to smoke simulations directly, I have to learn starting from the basics and I wonder is it even worth the time to do that. Given that this shot is not my main shot.
Anyway, since I am so stuck, I went to watch some tutorials on smoke simulations just in case. Before I started on that, I dropped Steven, Mr Ron an email asking them for help. Hopefully they will reply. Odforce also didn't provide much help for me.
I watched a tutorial by cmiVFX on dust and smoke simulations. And after that, I went and did some test, like literally just playing around.
Suddenly, I saw that Steven replied my email, in the email he told me that he solved my problem and that was how he did it.
The before effect:
The after effect:
The way he did it was that he read in the alpha information from the metaballs in SOPS into VOPS. He then multiply that information with the calculated density from the shader itself. So I officially solved my problem. I am ready to move on. Thanks Steven for your help.
Next, I asked Steven about how did he managed to read in the alpha information from SOPS inside VOPS without doing any referencing at all. He told me that, creating a variable in VOPS that has the same name as a variable in SOPS will result in the variable data in SOPS overwriting the variable data in VOPS. Hence, that was how he could read in the Alpha information from SOPS by just literally creating the same "Alpha" variable in VOPS that is found in SOPS.
I also asked Steven about how do I solved the smoke flickering problems that I had. He told me that for me to do that, I could let the particles which are supposed to die, live longer and fade them out gradually instead of just letting them die.
I will so definitely give that a try tomorrow.
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