I’m pretty sure my domain isn’t rendering into a black solid because my domain material nodes are all plugged into the Volume slot, NOT the Surface slot, which is what many others had a problem with. When I render smoke, I see random black rectangles or slivers and have no idea why…
I have about 15 smokes (cannons on a pirate ship) and I baked each one in a different layer before combining them, so some domains do overlap. I have an nvidia card, not AMD, so it isn’t that. My laptop has 16 gigs ram so it can handle the stress. I’m just at a loss. I would attach the .blend but then you’d also have to download the 15 separate smoke caches.
I have about 15 smokes (cannons on a pirate ship) and I baked each one in a different layer before combining them, so some domains do overlap.
It is the problem. There is no Zdepth info for volumes.It is only available for solid surfaces.
So when a domain is behind another one with no overlap, there is no problem because surface of domain can be used to know which one is forward.
But when there is an overlapping, there is no mixing of info of domains content. So, transmission is lost.
Putting domains on different layer is not sufficient. You have to render them separately on different renderlayer.
Or you have to simulate multiple smoke flows into one domain.
Or instead of smoke simulation, you can use particles. A Point Density texture can correspond to one flow and be reused with a different mapping inside a big domain.
Or you can use same technique with Blender internal but with several Voxel Data textures.
But I don’t know a cycles trick to handle this, easily.
