I have made a nice fire sim, and I want to use only one frame for a static image render. I saved the cache and run the animation to the frame I want. Then I go to the modifier panel and click on “apply”, but as soon as I do, the “fire” disappears. I have done the same with the cloth sim, and it works fine. Is it different for smoke/fire?
What’s the reasoning behind trying to apply the smoke sim
If you just want to render a single frame then just go to that frame and press render.
For a cloth sim you may want to export the cloth object as a mesh from a particular frame so you’ll apply the cloth sim to make the mesh real.
Richard, the reasoning was that it was the way it worked for cloth, so I thought it would work for smoke. I’ll try your suggestion. Thanks. But the other issue was that I wanted to append the one frame to another .blend file that has a lot of objects, two particle systems and more, and Blender just stops when I try to append the frame of the fire object. No error, no “Blender has stopped working”…Blender just vanishes and I see my desktop.
Richard, it just doesn’t work. I tried baking, baking all dynamics, saving the cache etc. I must have spent six hours trying every combination I could think of. I tried rendering the single frame the I liked, but it never rendered. The flame shows up in the 3D solid view, but not in the render view, nor in the full, final render. I have set up a node system in the way that it has worked before, but for some reason I must have missed something. I watched at least a dozen video tutorials, and most of them have different approaches to rendering fire in Cycles. It’s all a bit daunting and confusing. It’s too bad I spent quite a bit of time to create the logs and the fire sim in the first place, only to find that it won’t render. I may have to load an image of fire instead, and just make it have an emission shader.
If the fire is working in the viewport, but not rendering properly, it’s likely a problem with the shader. If you can post a screenshot or better still, a .blend file we can try to figure it out…
I just used “fake” fire instead. I used a landscape mesh, made sharp peaks, cut it out of the flat areas and just used a color ramp to shade it from pale yellow to reddish at the tips.