How to Render Large Scale Smoke in Blender


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”

  1. 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

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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!

  5. 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.

  6. 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?

  7. 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.

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