In this lesson, we're going to create the ammeter we're going to use in our main animation scene for
our Bifrost smoke, and I'm doing this in a blank scene because our animation scene has a lot going
on and everything would work a lot slower if we did it in the animation scene.
So I'm just going to do it in a blank scene.
We have a tourist we've created from the Polish modeling shelf.
I'm going to increase the subdivision's so we have more geometry and then I'm going to go to to form.
And go to the texture to former and also just real quickly, we're doing this as like a custom INM that
we're going to cash out, basically is what we're doing here.
And the reason we're doing that is because with the texture to former, you can't scale it.
So I'll show you that in a second.
But basically what the workflow is, is we're going to have an ATM.
And like the previous lesson, we just had a cube.
But for smoke, we want the smoke to look more natural and kind of have all this wispy stuff going on.
And we can get that from the ATM.
A lot of that from the ATM.
So we want to create something that's very erratic to kind of emit these kind of very natural organic
shapes.
So I'm going to click on this little checkbox over here next to Texture and I'm going to choose a noise.
And immediately you can see it's kind of wonky.
And we've covered the texture of former previously in the texturing section of this course.
Of course.
But again, you just kind of have to mess with this stuff and go to normal.
We can adjust the offset and then we want to go into the texture itself and then adjust these objects
second.
Right.
Click here to get a preview of what that is.
But also we can just see it here being represented inside of the geometry so we can adjust this stuff
as needed.
And basically what we're looking for, something very kind of like a freeze frame of an explosion,
essentially.
And so we can adjust this as needed.
And then the next thing we're going to do is to add an expression here at a time.
So I'm going to say equals time.
And what that does is when we play this back, it will just change the number here according to the
frames.
So it's a really quick way to get animation.
But if we're going to do smoke, that's kind of exploding.
This is too slow.
So I can.
Right.
Click here and say added expression, we get this little new window and we have our expression here.
This attribute is where we entered in the equals time.
So this is what Maya reads.
Is this little box over here this time means noise.
One time you can see this is noise one and then time is this attribute.
And then we typed in equals time.
So we're going to add to that and just say times like maybe six and edit and that'll save our edit.
And then we can play this back and see if that is fast enough.
So it's pretty erratic and we can kind of frame through each frame and scroll through, and I think
that'll give us enough change over time.
And so let me get to the other reason why we're doing this.
And actually, let me just add a little more geometry here and see if that helps before I explain a
little more why we're doing this so we can go down to tourists.
Let's see if we can just add some more geometry.
Maybe 40, so we just get a little higher resolution here so that the shapes have a little more volume
to them and can do different things so we can adjust this texture to form or as much as we want by going
into that and, you know, changing these things.
But in general, we can actually reuse this thing.
Once we cash it out, we'll be able to reuse this for any number of simulations.
Let's just increase the timeline to two hundred so that it will have the full range of our of our animation
scene and we can use the Olympic node to offset.
So even though we're on frame one and we're only going to cash frame two hundred, we can offset this
by a thousand frames once we import the Olympic cache.
So again, let me just cover why we're doing it this way.
If I was to scale this, it's going to get kind of wonky with the texture to former.
So you see how kind of change shape it's not holding its shape on a scale because it's moving through
this texture.
So we're cashing this out so it breaks down that texture.
So when I scale it, it's going to keep this shape when I scale it.
And scaling is important because that's how we're going to kind of turn on and off the effect when the
emitter we're going to scale up from zero.
So it's basically going to be nothing.
It's going to be down, you know, and we can get down to zero.
This is the other thing, like check this out.
I can't get this thing down to zero.
So we need to cash this out so that we break down the geometry so we can scale to zero, so we can make
this thing disappear and then we can scale up and, you know, retain that jaggedness that we have down
here and so that we can basically say, kaboom, here is our emitter and it's going to make a really
nice emitter for our smoke.
So let's go to cash Olympic cash export selection to Olympic.
And I call this, say, 15 Bifrost emitter.
And instead of using start in, I'm gonna use the time slider and we don't really need IVs or whatever,
but that's OK.
We'll just leave it there and revert that back to the original.
This is from the other section where we had to change that.
But anyway, this is the default and then.
Yeah, well, it's.
Let's export selection, it's going to play through and then in the next lesson, we can import this
into our main animation scene to create some smoke.
Thanks for watching.