I am attempting to create a paint blob in water, following this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw8hj2Uycvk. I have attempted this before and it didn’t quite work out, so heres my second attempt ;).
I am running into some (new) problems.
At 5.37 seconds in the tutorial, a second box appears inside the first box. I am guessing this second box regulates the smoke stream a bit? I am not quite sure what it does. Does anybody know? In my project, it does not appear. Should I make it appear and if so, how?
Under ‘flow’ it keeps resetting the settings, such as ‘subframes’ and ‘initial velocity’. In other words: as soon as I click on another tab to continue, the settings go back to default. Why won’t the setting stay put? The same goes for (under ‘domain’) ‘smoke adaptive domain’ and ‘smoke high resolution’; when I check the boxes and move on from there, the check marks disappear when I return at a later time.
I have previously done a test render and this render is incredibly grainy. I understood that it could be due to several things, but the main thing I have to change is increase samples. Default setting for samples appear to be set on 10. However nowhere can I find the number I have to increase it too. Considering the amount of grain, it must be a substantially higher amount. When I put it to a 1000, it however, won’t render. It stays stuck on frame 1 for hours.
To me, it doesn’t matter whether it takes a week to render, as long as I know that the result is good. But with the setting on 1000, I can’t even check to see if it’s heading in the right direction.
Can anybody help me with these problems? Thank you so much in advance!
I don’t have much experience with the particle system but i will try and help.
At 5.37 seconds in the tutorial, a second box appears inside the first box. I am guessing this second box regulates the smoke stream a bit? I am not quite sure what it does. Does anybody know? In my project, it does not appear. Should I make it appear and if so, how?
That’s probably the bounding box of the smoke, it’s not important as far as i know.
Under ‘flow’ it keeps resetting the settings, such as ‘subframes’ and ‘initial velocity’. In other words: as soon as I click on another tab to continue, the settings go back to default. Why won’t the setting stay put? The same goes for (under ‘domain’) ‘smoke adaptive domain’ and ‘smoke high resolution’; when I check the boxes and move on from there, the check marks disappear when I return at a later time.
They should not change under normal circumstances, they will however be reset to default if you change the object physics type to another type (for example, changing it from flow to domain will reset all the settings in flow and vice versa)
I have previously done a test render and this render is incredibly grainy. I understood that it could be due to several things, but the main thing I have to change is increase samples. Default setting for samples appear to be set on 10. However nowhere can I find the number I have to increase it too. Considering the amount of grain, it must be a substantially higher amount. When I put it to a 1000, it however, won’t render. It stays stuck on frame 1 for hours.
To me, it doesn’t matter whether it takes a week to render, as long as I know that the result is good. But with the setting on 1000, I can’t even check to see if it’s heading in the right direction.
Most animations are done with settings below 100 samples, even a still render will take 30min+ to render at 1000 samples on a decent PC. How fast it renders also depends on your PC’s hardware, cycles uses the GPU to render and will have to be correctly configured in blender if you have a supported GPU.
You can also do a test render by setting the frame somewhere in the middle of the smoke animation and rendering a still frame to see if your render settings are correct and that you’re happy with the look.
You might also want to change the resolution to 100% scale in the render tab, the render will be kinda blurry otherwise.
Thank you so much for your advice GrimZA. I took everything you said into consideration.
However rendering at a 1000 samples didn’t seem to work at all; a few hours later there was still not even 1 image. Which is strange, my Mac usually does not show such slow performances. I use it for various multimedia projects (for example in after effects).
So I took it down to 100 samples and after about 10 hours got one image (hooray :rolleyes:). It was however still grainy.
I scaled the resolution up to 100 by the way.
I read somewhere that it could be due to an unchecked ‘smoke adaptive domain’? When I go over to domain to check this box though, it resets everything I modified under the ‘flow’ tab (and I understand from you that this is just how it is…?). Is there anyway around that though? Could this ‘smoke adaptive domain’ even be the cause?
One more thing I dont understand: I only animated the x-axis, so how come the final animation (or at least that one still) shows the paint blob coming in diagonally (slightly on the z-axis)? I went over the settings but I can’t find it.
Note: didn’t watch the video, just the intro to see what’s about.
Second box you’re describing, i assume is the Smoke Adaptive Domain (have enabled it in your sample).
Set the file to similar result as in linked video - compare with yours, explore and learn (go through systematically).
Hope you’re OK with this.
If you want to modify the domain (like turning on adaptive smoke domain), you need to to have the cube selected. If you want to modify the smoke (anything under flow), you will have to have the icosphere selected.
Been trying your suggestions out… @Burnin: how come I can’t preview the smoke/paint blob in your file? As a consequence (I assume); when I start rendering all PNG’s end up white with nothing to see…
Sorry I’m back :(… I just keep running into problems, and the strange thing is that certain things I had already taken care of in previous attempts, seem to be giving me troubles in later attempts. Considering I have been trying for over a year (albeit off and on) to get this animation to work, I’d rather not quit now.
What I eventually want is a white ink/paint blob to be constantly emitting ink/paint in the center of the frame, with a black background.
So I had to depart a little bit from the tutorial (in that I did not animate any axis, kept surface settings on the default (so that it wouldn’t stop emitting), and changed background colors to black and smoke color white.
In addition, I can’t seem to change the settings to GPU; it gives me a memory error. I have figured out that this problem is probably related to my graphics card. I therefore kept it on CPU. I understood that it should work, although it would take more time to render.
In my added file, I would already expect a preview of a centered, white smoke ball (perhaps not in perfect condition yet, but at least something). Why is there nothing visible? What am I missing?
Thanks again in advance. The tips and tricks so far have been really helpful!
