I am new to using particle systems and need to show the cold air flow from the exterior of a building, pushing out the hot air through a window. The flow will come into the building through louvers, change color from blue to red and exhaust out the open windows. Any help of making this look like a nice airflow would be great...was debating fumefx but that would require a purchase and a learning curve...any help would be nice.

I attached a picture of where I need to have the air flow..

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Use a PF Source to insert and flow through the louver set and assign a Material Dynamic to the main event.  Create a material with an animated diffuse color blending from blue to red and assign it to the Material Dynamic inside the Particle View.  Randomize the particle age offset to give a bit of mix to the transition.

Stephen

You can also create a spline that represents the path of the air, then use a speed by icon in your pflow and path constrain the speed by icon to the spline.

For the material, use the particle age map in your diffuse slot. That map gives the particle a color based on its age. You also need a delete operator in your pflow for the map to work. You can set that to by particle age and specify the life span. To get more of a smoke look, use a noise or smoke map in your material’s opacity slot. You can have a radial gradient ramp in there and another particle age map to make it fade out at the end as well. Or you can use a particle age map in the opacity and use different bitmaps of smoke in the different color slot maps.

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