Hello, everyone! I’ve decided to spend a month or two on just testing/R&D with Blender’s smoke simulator. I was strongly inspired by how well other software (such as Maya and especially Houdini) handle smoke/pyro simulations, so I wanted to try my best to create something realistic or interesting involving the smoke simulator of Blender. In this video, you’ll see some of my results.
Note: This video is not exclusively about smoke simulations, it also includes other kinds of blender sims.
Also, here are some frames of some of the simulations (in no particular order):
Good effort there I especially like the explosion with the emitter that decreases in size. Looks absolutely lovely. I used the smoke- simulator a lot with the blender internal- renderer, back when it came out, which didn’t allow for scattering within the volume, so it didn’t look too great. However you could access your voxel- data by “heat”, which was great. Still waiting for this possibility in cycles, since the transition from fire to smoke seems always a bit harsh there
Maybe somebody knows whats up with that?
Anyways good stuff and cool tests You definitely spent a lot of time perfecting your smoke simulation (I can tell )
@woren94: Thank you! In the 15th test I used the Molecular addon by Jean Francois for the particle simulation. And that particle simulation was used to emit smoke. Each particle is an icosphere with a shader that gives the particles color by velocity and age.
I hope that helps. Though I can get into the specifics if you wish so.
@ChrisCordova: Thank you! Yeah, fire tends to get its color from the heat it produces. Cycles only allows color from density, which makes it pretty much impossible to render realistic fire in cycles. It would be awesome to get a heat/temperature attribute for cycles!
Hello again. Sorry for not responding to your replies. I’ve been quite busy with other things. This message contains responses to some of your replies.
@3pointEdit: The whole idea behind Test 16 revolved around the ability to change the color of smoke using a color ramp (The color ramp takes the blacks and whites and allows you to manipulate them freely). For the smoke simulation, I used two emitters, one emitting black smoke, and one emitting white smoke. By connecting the smoke color output to a color ramp, I was able to change the whites and blacks to red and light-blue. Since the colors of the smoke would mix into gray upon impact, I used the gray value as a factor for the emission (In other words, anything gray will have emission).
@burnin: Thank you! I’m not sure if I will share. I am very busy with other things currently. But if I have time, I might upload the .blends for the smoke simulations (not the simulations themselves, since they’re over 50gb) so everyone can have them for free. I’m just not sure where would be a good idea to share them, or if I will even have time to do it.
@DERBENDER: Whohoo! Awesome! I’m actually going to make a video, testing the smoke velocity and heat values in cycles. In fact, i’m working on it right now. (One of the things i’ve been busy with)
@BluePrintRandom: Great work! I’m curious to know what force fields you used for the particles.
Hello again! Since heat and velocity attributes for smoke were recently added to cycles, I couldn’t just go on without testing them. So I made this short video about them:
Having trouble to reproduce Test 16 though. Extracting the gray (for the smoke interaction) for the emission factor is the issue (see picture). Seems to be alot of grey from the white emitter? (And nothing from the black) Perhaps my smoke is not mixing well enough but I’ve tried a quite a bit (tried with coloramping to red and blue too). Would be great to know how to do it (or if you could share the blend file)
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I’m actually going to make a video, testing the smoke velocity and heat values in cycles. In fact, i’m working on it right now. (One of the things i’ve been busy with)