After looking around YouTube I didn’t found how to do such simulation, I didn’t found any video tutorials about it.
Let me try to explain what I’m trying to simulate:
Let’s say a sphere or any object falls to the ground (it doesn’t have to be physics simulation, it’s not the focus of what I try to do). and when it touches the ground it will create Thick Smoke or Dust around it in a circular waveshock.
I’m not talking about a massive Asteroid crashing earth, but something more like when a superhero character falls from a building we see on Anime or other cartoons usually in 2D Animations.
so the Waveshock is not covering all the city, but it’s more thick and disappearing as it spread around.
I’m not sure if it’s too complicated for me as a noob to do or not, but I’ll be happy if you can share a video tutorial or anything visual (step-by-step) so I can follow and learn how to do such thing.
This tutorial isn’t the newest one, but it covers exactly what you are looking for: https://youtu.be/mtSbZtPO_2w?t=26m27s. If you want to use cycles, you’ll have to do some changes to the particles’ material…
I will have a look on this tutorial for sure, I hope it’s still up to date with Cycles and all since it’s from an older version.
BTW - Actually I kind of made a nice result, not perfect but still… I had lots of issues with rendering.
The simulation was almost like I wanted it to look, I may share a short video or animated gif if I’ll get a chance later.
So everything is nice until I try to render… my computer just crush a few seconds after it start to try and render a frame, even if I use a very low resolution, image sequence instead of H.264 and what not. (on other cases everything renders fine).
I also tried the Shift+Z for realtime preview cycles render that I love so much… after the few first samples Blender crushes.
I didn’t realize that my current Hardware won’t be enough (look on signature for details), kind of a bummer I can’t afford a better hardware at the moment… I must use what I have.
I wish i had this hardware! Your HW is definitely NOT the problem! I have significantly weaker one and I am still able to replicate the tutorial.
The whole particle interface hasn’t changed since then, just the material creation is something different. If you got stuck at this point, ask!
As a general tip: ALWAYS render to images and later create your video from them! Otherwise it is likely that your whole output gets destroyed just because one frame failed to render for some reason.
Okay, now to your problem: does blender give you any kind output what exactly fails? Did you try to render an “average” project or something really huge?
OK, So… Before I’m going to get some sleep… (I forgot to do that for a few days)
I just loaded my simple smoke “ShockWave” or “PUFF” test I did but when I will start a render (still, I don’t even want to think about animation because of this) Blender will crush.
The Real-Time Cycles Rendering on Preview (Shift+Z) will start super low but after a few seconds it will crush.
I forgot to show the Shader of the smoke, but it’s just a COPY / PAST from the same “QuickSmoke” created so there is nothing special about the shader.
Any ideas how I can actually render without slowing my machine until it’s crush?
I understood from you that my machine should handle this with no issues at all but… probably something is wrong.
I will watch the old tutorial by Andrew because what I did isn’t even with particles.
So hard to know without the blend, I can see that the scale on your domain is 48, which may be your problem. You should always apply scales (ctrl a) on all simulation objects, as unapplied domain scales are known to cause issues. Beyond that, you’re always better off baking the simulation and then previewing it (rather than alt a , alt z) It’s definitely something blender can handle, and especially your machine seems good, so it’s soemthing with your settings. Post a blend if you can and you’re still having problems. Looks like a cool effect!
YAY it’s Photox!!! How how are you man?
Wow you helped me so many times in the past, and now again
OK, so I applied the scale, I used the “Back All Dynamics” but as I try to render even just one image…
Blender Crashes again when trying.
I’m sure that I did so many wrong things in there as my very first smoke effects attempt.
But hopefully you can find it and I will learn from this experience how to make smoke effects with no issues.
I’ve attached the .blend file so you can see all the issues I’ve made.
How you doing man? Don’t forget to sleep dude! (As I write this at 4:43 AM)
Hmm, a few things to try:
0) I am on currently on blender version 2.78 whichs seem to work for me. Upgrade if you’re on a lower version.
Render to an image format , .png or openexr and then turn it into video afterwards.
It used to be that you had to change to ‘experiemental’ from ‘supported’ in the feature set (right next to GPU dropdown) if you wanted to use smoke with gpu, this nolonger seems to be the case but you might try switching it.
It also used to be that you couldn’t place the camera inside the domain, although is seems you now can.
under rende rsettings, geometry you can lower the max bounces and increase step size to speed things up.
Hey Photox, Thanks for the reply. (now YOU go to sleep hehe).
I’m on the most latest version as always, so it doesn’t seem to be the problem.
I didn’t see any changes on the experimental or supported… still super slow and then crashes.
I tried but It doesn’t matter what format I use on the render, I can’t even use the preview (SHIFT+Z) before Blender crashes.
I will try to play with the settings as you suggested in #4 but I have a feeling it won’t help since I’m not really an expert.
Thanks again, I will probably keep trying to play with it to find what I did wrong to make my computer almost explode.
Also I just got up early, got like 6.5 hours of sleep so it’s not like I’ve been up all night. I was running some tests on my gpu and couldn’t sleep thinking about them. Nerd Alert!
Well in CPU mode… it takes like YEARS to show me 1 sample… and I can’t even wait to see how it progress but I bet it will also crash as it acts super slow comparing the simple simulation as you saw on the blend file, it’s nothing fancy at all.
It renders ok (without crashing) on mine. One other issue you have is that the smoke material (on the domain) has 2 big problems.
To the volume scatter and absorption color inputs you are feeding IN a diffuse shader node, you can’t do that, you should be feeding in colors. The nodes are color coded, green to green, yellow to yellow…
you have added you scatter and absorption and then you feed that into another add shader with no bottom input, which could cause problems.
I have made a bunch of changes, and this image renders on my GPU in exactly 1.5 minutes at 128 samples. See if this blend works on yours, you’ll have to re-bake the sim, I increased the resolution to like 88.
I downloaded the file but when I simulate (before render)
it shows the smoke for 2 frames then it’s gone so I can’t render smoke with this file to test it.
I have no clue about the materials on the smoke so what I did was a trick I saw on a tutorial in YouTube:
I searched with Spacebar for “QuickSmoke” I loaded it on a cube using a different layer for temporary, then I Copy the shader network and past it to my smoke node. and of course I deleted all the “Quicksmoke” cube object and everything on that temporary layer to keep things clean.
So… I guess the main problem should be the material after all… still I can’t use your file to test the simulation it as I explained.
UPDATE:
I Just needed to click: “Free All Bakes” now I can simulate… Sorry I’m very noob in this area as well.
Here is the snapshot:
Now what bothers me is that I have no clue about how to make a working Smoke Shader from scratch,
I mean I’m not smart enough to get it even after followed a few tutorials… ehhh I wish it was simple for future Smoke simulations I may want to do.
Another thing, how do I make the smoke to be on the floor and not hovering with that space?
Select the domain (dome)
In domain stetings, click ‘Free Bake’
Click ‘Bake’
The smok eonly appears starting at frame 60 I think, as you keyframed the smoke object
Hmm, not sure, feels like a collision margin of some sort, I’ve never really set up a sim quite like this with all the rigid body stuff.
One fun (and smart) thing to do is to run tiny test video (like 130 x 100pixels at like 20 samples) of the smoke sim, because sometimes it looks right frame by frame but in real time.
