https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mnXaD700bOk/hqdefault.jpg
http://www.blenderhd.com/
Learn the secret to rendering realistic smoke in Blender!
Handy light cache comparison:http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=222198&d=1363052495
And a density scale comparison: http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=222199&d=1363053139
Remember: For large scale smoke, the higher you set the light cache, the better your result will look, and the longer it will take to render!
My settings for the billowing smoke seen on my tests channel can be found here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=217921&d=1361226188
For the animation I only used a light cache of 100, not 300.
source
33 responses to “How to Render Large Scale Smoke in Blender”
Hello Man i've been burning my hair since 3 days , i rendered a lot of smoke animation all looks blurry etc , since you 've worked on previous version and you quite figure it out .
So where is this "light cache box " in v 2.8 . Because i put 512 even 1024 for one image , and still look shitty blurred bad (ive put bake sim at 256 ) still look derp when i render. It must be something like your light cache box thing . Cheers
I'm making my second animation with large scaled smoke you should check out my work……thanks to you…my smoke will look more realistic thanks for the tutorial
Your voice sounds like Colin Levy's.
Has anybody else tried this but found weird artifacts when rendering to animation? And if so, did you fix it and how did you do it?
Where is the light cache option when you render it with cycles?
This is really awesome !! I was never happy with smoke and always tried increasing the resolution without good results. Now I get it !
thank you very much! this is so beautiful!
Takes way to long to render! You should make a tutorial on how to make extremely realistic explosion! 😀 like movie realistic
thank you so much, such a simple and useful details that can completely change the quality of result
really amazing tutorial ! tnx
But anyway, thanks for explaining what all of the settings do. Thats another thing that was frustrating me is that most of these tutorials dont go indepth about what the settings do or how they affect the smoke, so im left to find out what they do on my own. Also, a lot of these tuts only regard Cycles and for some reason my PC doesnt like Cycles (renders turn out very grainy and it wont let me set my GPU to help with rendering) so Cycles is useless to me. But like i was saying, this project is based an actual structure fire so i need to get the smoke to look & behave like it would in a real world fire (such as rising and banking down into the room, flowing out windows/doorways, rising faster & more turbulent/thicker in areas closer to the fire and flowing slower & thinner in areas remote of the fire. Should i just set up multiple domains throughout the building to achieve this? Well if anyones interested in the results, ill be uploading videos on my progress in the near future. The actual nightclub looks very nice and very close to how it actually looked.
Im doing an animation of a structure fire. To be specific, it's a recreation of The Station NightClub fire of 2003 when a bands pyrotechnics ignited polyurethane sound proofing foam on the stages back wall. So this simulation requires a LOT of smoke. So as of right now, I've modeled & textured the interior and exterior of the nightclub based off of the floor plans and videos/pics taken inside of the nightclub and lighting & stage lighting setups. Now all thats left to do is the actual fire simulation. I dont have much experience with the smoke sim and my results so far are disapointing since the Domain object needs to envelope the WHOLE nightclub and areas outside where smoke exits the building. Another problem is the smoke and collision objects as smoke seems to collide about a half inch before the object its colliding with.
looks like a dick
Hey Jonathon, after many attempts at rendering out the smoke, you've given me a boost- I know what to do. Thanks so much. Here is a little clip I made which features my second smoke render: http://youtu.be/Mzj-Kir6vdA (Kilimanjaro Death Rally). Asante sana, bro!
The second one is the best IMO.
The last one looked nice, but wasn 't really realistic, since smoke always dissapears.
Nice tut anyway!
Awesome! This tutorial helped a lot!!!! Thank you!
This helped a lot 🙂
But the smoke cloud looks too solid. It looks like frozen water, but with a grey color. Take a look at this for example: http://bentoncleanair.org/uploads/SmokeCloud.jpg
Is there a way to make it a little fluffier just like that?
Thank you! 🙂
really amazing tutorial,
It took an hour to render ONE frame??
so what really make smoke rendered very slow?
Awesome tutorial! That smoke is great for photorealism! I would love to see another on how to make a realistic explosion that interacts with objects in a scene. Like an explosion coming out of a window or something. Anyway keep it up!
Before even watching the whole thing, let me just say THANK YOU for starting the video off with what the final result is going to look like! Too often I've found myself watching "tutorial" videos, only to realize at the end that they have no idea what they're talking about and I already knew everything they were talking about.
French?… WHY? NOOOOOOO!
When I render it, it is fine, but it is just in the viewport that it is a black box.
I am having a small problem: whenever I create quick smoke, the domain shows up as a solid black box. I have fixed it before, and I cannot remember how. The usual problem was my computer running out of memory, but that is not an issue, and I have double checked all of the settings from previous explosion tests, and I can't see what it is. Does anyone know a solution?
Hahaha, you had me worried there 😛
hahahahahhaha no there was another one that was like gimp toutorials or somthing, you sound exactaly like him.
Haha nope. I just looked up GimpTricks and the person speaking is definitely a woman. Not sure how I should take that… 😉
haha hey are you the gimp tricks guy?
Great, looking forward to it.
I applied what your tutorial showed me (well i have used smoke sim before but you really helped with the thickness and dark color) to a motion tracked video and will upload it soon
Tank you for this little tip, indeed the density, this way looks like for a massive explosion,( volcano, meteorite..) but i found i think is very dependent on output resolution, and camera distance.U dont want more detail then capable of showing in the output resolution, what i mean is that is no point in doing such higs density smoke for low resolution frames under HD. 99% of time real smoke is very thin anyway, but is really fast sim even with 100 division is fast for the quality is giving.
hmm I know a Ben Morgan who lives in WA…