Updated dust/ash dissolve (Patreon)

Wow, so I got a lot of questions on this one... :D

* Can you combine this with actual particles?

Yes, I updated the file with an example of that, emitting particles from the edges of the extrude as the flakes shrink.

 * Is he nude?

No, he's obviously wearing some kind of shoes. I also suspect he's been dipped in off-white polyurethane floor paint.

* Do the flakes collide with the body?

They do in the updated scene file, as does the secondary particles in the edge dissolve POP.

And as we have the packed points, the fastest way to get a VDB from that is using VDB from particles - and for something like this we really don't need a better collision volume.

* Like, for real, are you sure he's not nude?

Yes, trust me, I watch a lot of medical dramas like "The Resident" on TV, so I'm basically a FOX certified surgeon.

* How can you have the mesh movement "swirl" the flakes?

You could do an airfield simulation, though probably a tad overkill for this particular setup - but it's basically just a Pyro grid filled with an overall gas density, then you just add your animation as a collision object and sim it. Now you can use the velocities from that gas simulation to drive your particle movement and get a way more realistic swirling of particles as they are following the gas movement around the mesh. And it really doesn't need to be very high grid resolution to have it look good either.

But you can also kind of fake it transferring mesh velocity to the closest particles, which felt simple enough to include, so I added it to the updated scene file.

And the updated scene file is now linked in the original Patreon post:

 www.patreon.com/posts/19066658

I also want to add that stuff like me being able to take half a day for something like extending this setup is all due to you Patreons. I'm at a point where my income from Patreon cover just over a full workday and that full day will be spent benefiting you guys, doing stuff like this. :D

There's also a more general update coming this week where I'll talk more about where I want to take all this, do some updates on upcoming stuff and my plan over the rest of 2018... But yeah, hoping to be able to post that here in a couple of days.

Until then! :D