What am I missing so Blender can render fire

[Danny_Bouchard]

Hello everyone, I created a small explosion animation in Blender 2.80. Followed a tutorial to the letter and when it comes to rendering, the fire is light grey, in essence, like smoke. I double checked my settings, my smoke type is set to flow and the type to fire. I have spent many hours trying to figure this out. I am including my blend file. Can someone please give me a nudge so I can figure this out once and for all? Cheers!

Explosion Danny.blend (656.7 KB)

[a59303]

Didn’t check the file, but I find that with smoke sims at least if I save and bake it the render will work when it won’t otherwise. As opposed to the render view in the viewport.

edit: can’t seem to improve it much but I did notice that the flame attribute in the shader editor is capitalized which seems to make a difference in the render view.

[Danny_Bouchard]

Thanks for your replies. I just changed the cap “f” for flame and still same smoke instead of flame. I also baked and rendered as you suggested. Seems that since I am using transparency in the render settings, the rendered version’s smoke is very see through, almost non-opaque.

[a59303]

yeah its very faint, don’t know about an attribute for the density of the flames.

what is the tutorial?

[omgold]

Problem is the transparent background. Same as here:

Cycles strange render behavior!

Hello I encountered a strange render behavior in Cycles. I conect a emission node in the volume. Thats the material. I enable transparent in Render>Film. I render this setup in the preview render. Every thing is OK. Now I render it, and there ist nothing I see. And restrict rendering of the Object is off, so you shuold see it. When I put a plane under a portion of the cube, it renders the cube only where the plane is!? Here a image of the setup and result. [grafik] What is the problem? Tha…

[Danny_Bouchard]

Hi omgold, thanks for your reply. I just removed the transparency from the render settings. Same result, smoke instead of fire. Tried both eevee and cycles.

[a59303]

If I follow these steps in the 2.8 release, I get color with your file.

open

change the Flame to flame

delete bake

turn off transparency

jump to first frame, play to suitable frame

render

[omgold]

Also note that the pricipled volume node adds volume scatter, which interacting with the sun (of strength 1000!) easily outshines the red flame with white light.

[Danny_Bouchard]

A59303

Followed your procedure and I still have smoke.

omgold

Changed the sun to 100 and still have smoke albeit darker grey now.

Guys could it be my laptop which isn’t powerful enough?

[a59303]

I’m guessing that that isn’t the issue, although when I was playing with your file I did drop the resolution of the sim to 32 and the resolution of the render to 32 and then half the render size so I could fiddle quicker.

[omgold]

Okay, check this version:

Explosion Danny.blend (696.2 KB)

For me it works definitely:

[Danny_Bouchard]

Thanks mate. I opened your file and it works better for me as well… but am getting white blotches for about 7 frames. Also, the rendered version isn’t quite like the solid version.

[omgold]

Ha, yes, making it look similar to viewport in rather tricky. We recently tried to shade an explosion with Cycles, with limited success. You might find the thread (and the tutorial linked in the first post) still interesting:

Help turning smoke into fire with nodes

I’m currently following this very old tutorial by Andrew Price on making an explosion and around 16:14, he sets up textures in the Texture panel to make the smoke simulation look like an explosion by mixing two Voxel Data textures together. Obviously in Blender 2.8, this can’t really be done that way. I’m guessing this kind of thing will need to be done in the Node/Shade Editor…? I’m still a novice with this kind of thing, so I’m not sure how I would achieve the same or a similar result. All …

Mostly it is a matter of finely tweaking the emission, absorption and scattering components, I believe. Don’t think it will be any easier with Eevee, though.

[Danny_Bouchard]

OK thanks bro. I will give it more work and study some more. I like Andrew’s tutorials and will go over and check. I also have Blender 2.79b on my laptop so can try with that version as well.