Creating a shockwave with Phoenix FD


By Hammer Chen

This tutorial is requested by one of our users who said that it was difficult to create a shockwave with Phoenix FD. Here, I am going to explain the critical step that he might miss.

This is my scene setup: a Pflow (PF Source) in the middle, spreading out particles horizontally; a PhoenixFD Fire / Smoke Simulator; and a Phoenix FD Fire / Smoke Source (PHXSource) that picked up the PF Source in the scene.

I like to use the PFlow in this case because of the "Random horizontal” option, which allows you to emit particles horizontally. This is perfect for making a shockwave.

However, if you pick this PFlow as your smoke source and run a simulation with the default settings, you may end up like the image above even if you set your particle speed very high.

The key step is to tick the Motion Vel. option of your Phoenix fire/smoke source. Enabling it will allow the smoke to inherit velocity from the PFlow.

In addition to enabling the Motion Vel., you may want to crank up the value to get the right look of the shockwave.


One final word. To enhance the turbulence details for the fast-moving particle source, you can increase the Simulator's conservation quality and set the Steps Per Frame to 2.

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