The last of the Noise parameters; Position Scale!

Noise parameters, part 2:  Noise Strength!

Now, for the Noise Series.  Upres Factor creates a higher resolution grid for the noise, essentially multiplying the domain resolution by the Upres Factor.  Just like cranking up resolution, going crazy with the resolution/upres factor combo platter can quickly swamp your computer!

Dissolve is fairly straightforward--you tell blender what age (in frames) you want the smoke to start dissipating.

For the last of the Gas Parameters--Vorticity!  This one will get out of control if you aren't careful!

Next up in the Gas Parameters section; Heat!  Not the most exciting of parameters, but that just keeps the excitement building that much more, right??

Now, on to the Gas Parameters section!  Buoyancy Density seems simple enough; the less dense something is, it should rise faster through a container of constant density.  How hard could that be?

Resolution always leads me down the Primrose Path.  I find myself thinking that if I just had a little better resolution, I could see what I needed to change.  That quickly leads to running the simulation overnight, waking up to find it didn't do what I wanted, and wasting another day waiting for an overnight run.  The question is always how much resolution is enough?

This is the first in a series of short posts where I examine various parameters of Blender's smoke simulator one at a time, while holding the rest constant.  I started this because I was tired of the amount of time I spent going around the tweaking-simulating-tweaking loop.  I hope this will provide me the background understanding to quickly get close to the look I want before I spend a lot of time on high-resolution simulations that take time to process.

All the world's a stage...

by Billy Ray Shakespeare

This is the second in a series where I come up with Uncomplicated Ideas™ that would really have helped me out if I thought of them at the beginning of the project.  Today's idea--just make a stage!

This happens to me frequently; I start a project and things go smoothly.  I can make a widget--a leaf or a column or a fish.  But it doesn't occur to me until too late that when I duplicate that nice widget, especially if I duplicate it hundreds of times, my system might complain.  So I've learned a few lessons that, if I listen to myself, will make future projects finish much more smoothly. 

 So, a lot of life happening and a few technical difficulties slowed down my progress.  But, I've got a little more free time now.  It's back to work!

My Image Of The Month (IOTM) series has been delayed by many things.  One of those is the complexity of modeling detailed buildings.  I get lost in the details.  With the recent addition and improvements to Blender's Geometry Nodes, I wondered if that would be a good workflow for some of these buildings with complex but repetitive elements.

This section will deal with generating the mesh for a case.  I will initially create a crude wind tunnel model for 2-dimensional (2D) flow over a flat plate.  That is an instance where the geometry could be generated by hand.  I will use simple tools to automate that process and allow for increasingly more complex geometries.

This was going to be a quick end to the turbulence topic (for now), but I fell down a gnuplot rabbit hole.

Keeping track of the physical properties, so that results can be compared to other calculations or real-world data, is difficult for me.  So this section dealing with changes to the Reynolds number needed to be its own section.

My short attention span got bored with all the paraFoam changes in the Cavity Flow tutorial.  So we rejoin that, halfway through...

This entry starts with a simple 2D cavity flow walk-through.

I'm restarting my attempt to understand and become proficient using OpenFOAM.

With the basic game dynamics working, I started to add animation to the assets.  Blender's glTF exporter makes exporting animations to webGL relatively simple, but there were still plenty of Opportunities For Learning (OFL) to occur.  :)