Hey so im making a visualizer as a small project for my friends song and i made a cigarette burning animation but i want to add an ash pile and a couple of butts in there to make it look more appealing does anyone know how i can make a pile of ash? Or the way to go about it at least?
This is how it looks so far but it looks for bland i just want to add. The ashpile with a few butts to make it more appealing
I think if you wanted to save on memory and polygons, you can go the lazy way and slap a texture to a low res geometry. You could also go the particle system way and add real individual particles, but that is costly. Or a mixture of both, using particles on top of low res geometry with the underlying image. I guess you could watch the intro to particles course:
https://cgcookie.com/courses/particles-introduction-to-simulation-nodes
Apart from how to make it, a pile of ash? It'll take a lot of cigarettes to get enough ashes to make a pile and besides the amount, cigarette ashes are very light and don't tend to form piles. It's not like sand.
But anyway, I'd go with a Particle System to make the ashes. It's not going to be easy to make it realistc, though.
Yeah sorry i didnt mean a pile i meant something to represent some ash to be on ashtray
I guess you could take as a base workflow, how it's done on the ground of the hut in this course:
https://cgcookie.com/lessons/ground-detail
It's not too complex really, it's molding a mesh to conform to a pile and adding a texture, be it procedural or image.
This guy does it using particles. It's a timelapse video. I can't find the one I was looking for. It is a lot better. If I find it I'll post it.
https://youtu.be/cg-wt--WJPI?si=n4nGNsSjqDf_bLm8
Something like this not to much