Smoke particle system (Motorola Pebl Commercial)

[revolutionary_edge]

This is the best forum to post this question and i hope i can get my answer here.I just saw the commercial done by 'Digital Domain' for Motorola Pebl and just amazed to see the work and specially making of the commercial. In one shot of the making they have shown how they did the thick smoke simulation after asteroid hitting the ground and erupts thick amount of smoke and i want to know how did they get that simulation output in heating mode. Here's the capture of the video i am putting to get my point clear.

Snapshot

http://img240.imageshack.us/my.php?image=digitaldomainmakingofpepr7.jpg

This is the smoke particle system they made for the commericial and i was wondering that its really good way to show your simulation for breakdowns for your vfx scenes. But how can we achieve this type of effect of like heating mode with green, blue and yellow depth modes ? I am using afterburn plugin for my particle system.

Could anyone explain how we can do it ?

Thanks

[sorin]

I think u can use particle age to obtain an effect similar to that.

[eyesgt]

i'm not 100% sure, but it looks like the image on the left is just the normal to better control lighting in comp.

[Aruna]

The image on the left is the source image for the smoke on the right. DD uses openEXR to create an image file which contains quite a bit of information that the compositor can use in the comp. What you're seeing on the left is not a heat map, it's the final render of the FX element which is used to create the smoke and other bits in the smoke. It is possible that there were heat passes within that left image, which were used to distort the smoke someone in the right image. The colors you are seeing are probably not depth passes, but like eyesgt said, normals.

[JohnnyBlaze]

Quote from Cody Harrington, artist at DigitalDomain:


I did the pyroclastic cloud at D2 for this spot, I used rgb lights to render the voxels (with D2's storm) so that the lighting could be controlled interactively in the composite...

Hope that explains it a lil. Storm is an in-house tool at DD, that does high-end voxel-based fluids (maybe more?). Can't help you doing it in Afterburn, tho...


Greets
Chris

[maynard]

the colored image at first glance looks like optical flow data... or vecotr data that you might see in something like real Smart Motion Blur.. or pixel farm optical flow data.

i would have used pyrocluster to build this.. then you can use the vector data in fusion's deep pixel nodes to create lighting effects as well as RSMB

[maynard]

oops, vector data references the direction of the flow in RGB data.

i should have read the first passage a lil better.

sorry

[revolutionary_edge]

Thanks Aruna for explaining the process. I think these are rgb light for final smoke system which then took to Nuke for compositing and giving the right look for the smoke.