by Boikat » Sun Jul 06, 2008 8:41 am
Thanks! The long trail is part of the problem, since I'm using the red smoke effect from the pitts stunt plane. It just hangs too long and disapates. If there were a way, and there is, but I haven't found it yet, I'd shorten the contrail effect and what would really help is find a way to delay the appeareance of the red smoke as the smoke effect "fell", or at least, that would give the illusion of falling after release, rather than just apearing as if it's already fallen the distance as soon as the effect was triggered.
Right now, I think I'm using about six lines for the smoke effect to appear to be dropping downward. In order to make it look like it's spreading horizontally, I need to start adding lines for left and right to create a wider swath of the red smoke to make it look like it's dispersing.
Of course, another option is to grab the smoke bomber water drop effect from that DC-4 that was just posted yesterday for FSX (And it's effects need to be tweaked a bit, too. The drop appears to the side of the aircraft, leading me to believe that it was a FS9 conversion). That would be an option, but I'd really like the effect to appear as the red retardant.

"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" Adam Savage, Mythbusters