May 7, 2012 8:00 AM

by B.N. Reporter

Last week,  through Blender Cookie (CGCookie.com), Thomas Piemontese--a Blender artist--has shared his technique of creating a fairly believable Tornado in Blender at the following link:

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2012/05/02/creating-a-tornado-in-blender-with-particles-and-the-smoke-simulator/

His technique of "sculpting" a tornado is to combine two to three types of force fields to control the particles: (1) "Force" for "coning" the particle, (2) "Vortex" for twisting and (3) "Magnetic" for removing a screw-like look from the particles, as illustrated below:  

There might be a better way to do it otherwise, but certainly Thomas' way's worth exploring as the top banner--created following his tutorial--above well demonstrates.

* Caution: You might have to use Blender 2.62 to follow his tutorials. You can download the Blender 2.62 version in zip file format at the following link:

http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.62/

Do not install but unzip the compressed file and run Blender from the unzipped folder.

Related Links:

1. http://tomwalks.deviantart.com/

2. http://cgcookie.com/blender/2012/05/02/creating-a-tornado-in-blender-with-particles-and-the-smoke-simulator/

3. http://cgcookie.com/blender/2012/05/04/creating-a-tornado-in-blender-with-particles-and-the-smoke-simulator-part-02/