Moving on from the exhaust sim for now, I am starting the sim for the turbo flames when the car boosts through the loop. I have several concerns about this sim, mainly due to the speed of it. The car moves just about a whole 1 meter unit in Houdini per frame which I know will probably cause a lot of problems with the flames.
Since this sim is coming from the same area that my last sim is coming from, I set up my networks mostly the same way. Imported the car, removed excess geometry, copied the proxy geometry and particle source to points on the animated geometry, then created the sims.
The particle sim is currently nothing special. Because the sim is moving so fast, I lowered the life span of the particles to .04 just so there wasn’t a super long trail of particles behind the car. I increased the turbulence in the pop wind node to 8 so there isn’t a spaghetti noodle of particles coming out of the pipe.
I was having trouble with the emission of the particles in the beginning, because of the speed of the sim, using a short tube to emit particles would show clear gaps between frames. After some testing, I learned that simply making the tube longer helped because the emission overlapped in the next frame, covering up those gaps.
I have not done any work with the pyro yet, but from just creating a basic flame, I can see that there will be issues with the density of the flame. I assume increasing the particle emission could fix it and help with the texture. I plan to adjust the emission timing as well so that there are short flames like the ones in my reference.