Problem when rendering smoke in cycles, it appears black?

So, at the moment, this was supposed to be a simple motion track experiment, but I’m having problem when rendering out the final product. I wanted to have an explosion go off in the background, but when I render it out, the smoke cloud just appears black, and I can’t figure out what settings I need to change. Any help would be appreciated. I’ve attached the blender file and screenshots of the problem.

Imushroom cloud 2.blend (831 KB)




Set:

  • more bounces to Volume Light paths. Properties Editor > Render > Light Paths > Volume: 1+ (eg. 3)
  • less density to Smoke Shader (eg: 0.76)

To speed up rendering you can set Volume Sampling
> Step Size: higher than default, since the geo/detail is far and small (eg. 0.5)
> Max Steps: lower - || - (eg. 128)

… result:
http://i.imgur.com/8Z24SlJ.jpg

If you select the domain and go to the node editor window, you can pretty much control everything there… and for the color you can add a hue/saturation node right after the Attribute “color” node… then you can adjust the color and the density pretty much all you need…


i think for amd, you cant have the last add shader, since they dont like empty shaders. maybe also put a transparent in the surface.