In this short post I am going to talk about how we used and integrated built-in XSI particle system to make smoke simulation for our pipe smoker character in Vishka Studio’s current short animated movie Baran.

Please notice that I’m not going to talk about dynamics here, I just want to talk about the look of smoke simulation here.

At first I started to look what XSI gave us to make smoke! After a short time I decided that there is no built– in appropriate fluid system — at least for making phenomenon like smoke– I’m not going to complain about XSI, but there are many smoke simulation tools in Maya, Houdini and plugins like FumeFX for 3ds max. Maybe the developers of XSI just wanted to stick to the animation part of XSI which is the excellent section of XSI in my opinion.

I don’t want to stick so limited number of software because I’m at first a software engineer but there is some limitation and difficulty in our process to export animations and, character’s mesh translation between different 3D platforms. So after some talking with my technical supervisor Mr. Ghobady we decided to make the entire simulation completely in XSI.

The point was, we may have the same result as fluids do but with some tricks in rendering and simulation.

With much more particle rate and smaller size we have the first step of making smoke. The rendering result is not much interesting but after applying another built-in XSI tool –compositing QuarticBlur filter– we have the final smoke result. Easily

First try with default particle parameters.

Second try with more particle rate and smaller size.

The same simulation with applied Quartic blur.

Smoke