Introduction to Smoke Simulation in Blender 2.5 – Day 1

Introduction to Smoke Simulation in Blender 2.5 – Day 1

on Aug 10th 2011 with 27 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Software: Blender
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Estimated Completion Time: 30 Minutes

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

This entry is part 1 of 9 in the Best of Blender Session
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This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Introduction to Smoke Simulation in Blender 2.5

In this invaluable, in-depth series we’ll be taking a look at smoke and fire simulation techniques within Blender 2.5, and who better to take us through this process than the man behind the official documents himself, Gottfried Hofmann. Prepare to be amazed at just what Blender can do for free.

Republished Tutorial

Every few weeks, we revisit some of our reader's favorite posts from throughout the history of the site. This tutorial was first published in June of 2010.

Additional Files/ Plugins:

Introduction & Pitfalls

There are many tutorials out there that cover how to set up a basic smoke simulation in Blender 2.5, but things can be quite tricky and there are many pitfalls you might run into along the way. This first tutorial explains how to avoid many of the problems that might occur, saving you some valuable troubleshooting time.

Video 1

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Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.

This tutorial is Day 1 in a series – Go to Day 2 and Day 3.

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By

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Gottfried Hofmann is a student of computer sciences doing freelance work to fund his studies. He is also a member of the aspiring film team, Raubkopictures. His work evolves mainly around the postproduction process.  

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  • hetors

    It looks awesome, almost like fumefx.
    Thanks for the tutorial, I´ll be waiting for the Day 2.

  • jakobweiq

    this is one “smoking” tut!!!!!

    (pun intended)

  • Willem

    A very needed tutorial. Thank you so much.

  • http://poliman.pl Strony Internetowe Kraków

    wow, great effect!

  • Pascal

    Great teacher skills ;-)

    Your help is very appreciated. Thank you

  • Jim

    Great tutorial. What flavor of Linux are you using?

  • http://www.raubkopictures.de Scott
    Author

    Thx Pascal, it’s nice to hear that :)

    Jim: I did this tut on Ubuntu 10.4. For the screencast I used RecordMyDesktop…

  • Ben Anderson

    @Jim

    I’d imagine he’s using Ubuntu Studio. A multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu.
    http://ubuntustudio.org/

    I look forward to doing this tutorial later on today when I have time.

  • fogfrogblog

    how long does it take for you to finnish a days tutorial coz I just can’t wait for the next one

  • andar

    thanks awsome, but liquid tutorial needed here ; )

  • http://iblend.info iKlsR

    awesome tutorial… CGtuts definately needs more like these…

  • Mats H

    Thanks, this is so cool!

  • nrk

    Loved your tutorial! Thanks, wanted to make a (hopefully) useful comment. The reason you have to turn density down to zero is the smoke gets applied to the texture stack. The texture stack is how you combine multiple effects one on top of the other. I know it doesn’t seem to make sense, but I do a lot of point density volume affects to my volume material and the texture stack allows me to combine smoke with them for some really cool effects. Unfortunately it isn’t really intuitive to most users, but after you get the hang of it you can do some pretty amazing stuff.

    • http://www.badgrenola.com Matt Brealey

      Thanks for the tip, nrk!

      Matt

    • http://whimsycoll.com Whimsy Collective

      Good to know! Thanks NRK!

  • jamal

    It just doesnt work. When i bake it all I get is a still smoke cloud. No move at all.

  • Durand

    Thanks, nice and detailed!

  • Cool Webber

    Mist

  • Lucas Fowler

    sweet a tutorial on smoke and i think you guys should make a tut on fluid and cloth just helping…

  • Mercenaries

    help me….
    i follow all step…
    but i can’t render the image…
    just when i render i always meet grey image…
    i can’t see the smoke anywhere….
    please help me… T.T

  • Steve

    Excellent Tutorial!

    I’ve been looking into simulating fire and smoke for a while but buying 3DSmax and FumeFX filled me and my wallet with Dread. That and I didnt want to desecrate my mac by installing Windows.

    Oddly I never thought about looking into free software such as blender. Well you live and learn. I’ll give this a go :)

    P.S Matt that Camera still needs texturing ;)

  • http://www.lucid-concepts.com Chris

    Could anyone help me? It appears that no matter what version of Blender I run, I do not get a “Smoke High Resolution Cache” menu. I get all of the others, including the standard “Smoke Cache”, and also the “Smoke High Resolution”.

    I really want to get into particles in Blender, but I am finding problems like this to be a serious barrier.

    I am running Win 7 Pro 64Bit.

    Cheers

  • http://www.lucid-concepts.com Chris

    Bizarrely, I just opened the scene file attached at the top (didn’t notice it at first) and it has the “Smoke High Resolution Cache” menu. Blender seriously confuses me. Is there something I need to toggle to make it work normally?

    Cheers

  • http://www.BlenderDiplom.com Gottfried Hofmann

    Chris: The caches have been combined, the difference between hi-res and low-res cache ain’t no more!

  • G_Rassovsky

    Hi there, thanks for the tut… I have a problem though both with my version and the downloaded blend file when I back the smoke it only goes 1 direction (in the positive z) I have this same problem every time I try to do smoke… what could be the issue? Using blender 2.66.0 r54697 Thank you!!

  • remo conan

    i’m trying to follow this with the blender 2.66 release, but I’m not getting the smoke cache to work, its all greyed out and I cannot access the settings, is there something that i missed? i’m finding that there’s alot of great old tut’s out there but while blender keeps changing its hard to find tutorials that explain things better and less pitfalls, however it seems here that since 2.5 hindsight can fall way behind.
    thanks for the look in, shame that I wasted 2 hours, only to face the blendcaching memory wall, i mean why is my panel all greyed out!??