I am working on an effect for a short film that involves a large wall of clouds that have a whirlpool like effect. While I have had success with extruding volumes along a path in smoke sims I am finding that creating a detailed whirlpool effect is a different beast as you have to deal with problems like density levels and the swirling movement causing a blowback effect. So after battling this problem for a while I have decided to breakdown and ask for advice. If anyone has any ideas I will be very greatful.

To drive things like that I would inject a custom field into my simulation. First model a basic shape , then create a vector attribute ie , sculpt the normals on the geometry to form the basis of the attribute. This sort of work flow can be used to do all sorts of things.
Heres something I did a while ago. The smoke is deflected around the object. https://vimeo.com/10429733 [vimeo.com] .

Rob

Maybe try to get some info from the Blue Sky or DreamWorks talk from this session:

http://s2012.siggraph.org/attendees/sessions/100-120 [s2012.siggraph.org]


Cheers,
Koen

Any idea how I could get access to these discussions?

they might be on the full conference dvd, do you have access to that?

I just checked the DVDs here at work and those specific talks are not documented, in fact I would expect that $325 DVDs would have the talks themselves, but nope! Just a collection of one page abstracts and few short demos…

Sorry if my question is not too smart - why not use custom force field in simulation? - it's easy to archive whirlpool effect along any curve this way.
Simulate lowres and then use that velocity fields for highres details?
Or is simulation out of question at all?