Hi
I am trying to create falling powder similar to the attached images.
I create a cylindrical shape in CAD, I then used the flakes displacement to create a sort of powdered material. I thought that I could vary the width of the stream by using an opacity map but it all ended up looking pretty terrible. Any suggestions on how best to approach a material like this would be much appreciated.
I could see this being very difficult and inefficient to do with CAD, you might want to try particle systems in a polygonal modeling suite such as Blender3D (free and open-source) or Maya/3dsMax/Cinema4d and import those particles into Keyshot for rendering/
Hello.
I didn't tested it yet, but I think this can work with a sweep (like the flow of the powder), displace this shape a bit and use a scattering media for the powder. With a very high dense and a small transparency distance, it should look like the ref pics. You can control powder color in the diffuse channel and use a very dark grey as Albedo to give it a solid look.
Hope that helps
Cheers
Marco
PS: sorry for haven't time to send an example. I wrote this text with a mobile phone holding my morning coffee.