Relatively new to Blender, been in an out of using it at a novice level for a number of years. I find myself with a need to represent the sonic boom shock front of an object for a project that I'm working on and I'm looking for some expert guidance. This is kinda what I'm looking for:
Ideally I'd have something that can generate an image with these kind of shock waves as they'd look from any viewing angle. The largest caveat of this is that the camera is located 10s of KM from the object so that'll impact rendering but that's a separate question.
I've found both of these:
But I'd prefer to not use a physics simulation. I don't need that level of accuracy. The first reference there has an answer that states that varying internal IOR wasn't possible for Blender in 2014 but is it possible now?
My alternative though was to represent the shock bow wave as a thin cone with a material very similar to air but with a slightly different IOR. Possibly a series of these to approximate how the IOR of air is changed with a pressure wave. Possibly inspired by: How to Create an Sci Fi "Plasma/Energetic/Force Field" Material in Cycles?
I've seen a handful of Blender tutorials aimed at generating explosive shock-waves but none of them come close to what I'm looking for. The idea here would be to generate a cone as above and have the render look like the pressure wave as seen in this gif (kinda hard to see, sorry).
