Sound wave help

[rastafari]

Hi, I would like to know how can I move a sound wave from a speaker in a visible way -like water, dust or light-. or where can I find a tutorial to learn how to do this.

[duncanbrinsmead]

Here is a mini tutorial that uses the spring mesh solver on a 3D fluid (this simulates soundwaves in air.. the trick is setting the shading so you can see the waves).
1. Create a 3D fluid with emitter
2. Set the solver to spring mesh
3. Edit the opacityGraph.. the position 0.5 horizontally is the zero pressure point:
Change the first indice position to 0.5
Change the second indice position to 0.52
4. Make dropoffShape = OFF( edge dropoff does not work properly with this setup ).
5. Set the fluid resolution to 30 30 30
(playback now shows an expanding spherical shell)
6. Set all the boundaries to None.
7. Turn on self shadowing to help see the volume better
8. Now edit the emitter to create a smooth pulsing:
In attr editor field for density/voxel/sec type:
"=sin(time * 20)"
Turn off jitter.
9. On the fluidShape adjust transparency to taste.

You now have the basic effect.
You can use damp on the fluid to make the sounds fade as the propagate. Also you could add indices to the left of the opacity graph to make negative wave pressures visible. By making the color input=density and assigning colors to the graphs you can give negative pressures a different color than positive pressures.. for example the left half of the graph could be blue and the right half red.
For fun select an object and the fluid then do fluids->makeCollide. The waves will now reflect off the object, be blocked and refract around it. You can also add more emitters, etc.

Duncan

[rastafari]

thanks

[david-schoneveld]

Am I missing something... I've followed the steps you laid out, but all I get is a white box. here's the steps I took

fluidEmitter -pos 0 0 0 -type omni -der 1 -her 1 -fer 1 -fdr 2 -r 100.0 -cye none -cyi 1 -mxd 1 -mnd 0 ;
// Result: fluidEmitter1 //
connectDynamic -em fluidEmitter1 fluidShape1;
// Result: fluidShape1 //
setAttr fluidShape1.solver 2;
setAttr "fluidShape1.opacity[0].opacity_FloatValue" 0.5;
setAttr "fluidShape1.opacity[1].opacity_FloatValue" 0.52;
setAttr fluidShape1.dropoffShape 0;
setAttr fluidShape1.resolution 30 10 10;
setAttr fluidShape1.resolution 30 30 10;
setAttr fluidShape1.resolution 30 30 30;
setAttr "fluidShape1.dimensionsW" 10;
// Press the ESC key to stop playback
currentTime 14 ;

that's up to step 5 and it's just a white box. I've messed with diffent settings, for the past 45 minutes trying to get it, but I can't get the spring-mesh solver to be anything but a box...

I'm useing Maya 5, is that a fix in 6 possibly?

[duncanbrinsmead]

Your problem is that you adjusted the "value" of the opacity indices. You need to instead adjust the "position" (i.e. left right position).

Duncan

[david-schoneveld]

Aaaaaaaaahh Thanks!

[dob2546]

thanks~