Tutorial Details
- Software: Blender 2.5 Alpha 2
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- Completion Time: 30 minutes
- Scene File: FlameTut.blend
Final Product What You'll Be Creating
In the second part of our invaluable, in-depth series looking at smoke and fire simulation techniques within Blender 2.5, Gottfried Hofmann shows us how to create fire! The incredible (and let’s not forget, completely free) result could be used as a flamethrower, dragon breath, a rocket trail…the possibilities are endless!
Techniques covered in this second video include :
- How to correctly set up the particle system.
- Using a second voxel data texture along with the dissolve setting to fake fire.
- Learn how to adapt the particles to the domain divisions.
- How to avoid a few more common pitfalls!
So let’s get going!
Video 1
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Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.
The Screencast Key Status Tool used in this tutorial is available here.
This tutorial is Day 2 in a series – Go to Day 1 and Day 3.
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By Gottfried Hofmann
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Nice!
This is the smoke/fire tutorial we’ve all been waiting for
Very nice addition to the first series, those parts where you explain individual settings and show how they behave in comparison are immensely useful and add a great deal to the overall idea of how this somewhat clumsy and difficult yet powerful and respectable smoke system in Blender works. Thanks!
I never though you can do such amazing things in Blender… I can’t believe it’s a free app! Time to brush up on my Blender skills.
There are going to be even more improvements for Smoke/Fire sim. The original smoke simulator developer kind of disappeared and I think his development stoped for smoke sim. However, there is someone else working on smoke patches. The newest patch is looking great and I hope it’s going to be included in the next month or so! So check smoke sim out from time to time
!
Looks awesome, going to have a look at your material settings
.
A new patch? Seems like I did not notice it. You got a link?
Fortunately Genscher was never really alone on the smoke thing, he had support by Farsthary and Miikah. The smoke sim won’t be abandoned for a while
Btw: There is still time to pre-order the Sintel Open Movie DVD or become a Sponsor:
http://durian.blender.org/sponsors/
(there will be a lot of valueable source files on the DVD, including the Durian fire setups!)
Thx Tobey for pointing out the good parts in the tut
Hehe yeah .. Guess what: The new patch is from Miikah
! It’s a brand new patch from the 6th July so I guess it’s ok that you did not notice it 
. There is also a build downloadable on graphicall.
http://www.miikahweb.com/en/blog/2010/07/06/new-blender-smoke-patch
Btw: About the smoke sim not being abandoned.. Well, I’m not completely sure about the current state of smoke sim. When I used my old system I remeber everything was working fine in the 3D viewport. But the last time I worked with the smoke sim is probably one or two months ago. Now I had to reinstall Windows 7 and my ATI graphic card drivers and it seems like the viewport preview of the smoke sim is broken (initial settings display correctly, but changing resolution, shape of the domain and other things screws it up)
Wow! That patch is amazing! It adds so many features I wanted or try to get via workarounds!
HOLY this is AMAZING!
Great!!!, this second part is awesome too.
Greetings.
This is the most comprehensive guide for Blender 2.5′s smoke simulator and volume renderer. You solved several problems people face (especially with Blender’s buggy handling of cached data)
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
Does this work on the recent release 2.53 beta? I have tried to get this to work but to no avail.
I’m having the same problem, whiteBox, I’ve been trying to find other people having trouble with this in 2.53
Hey FEDFilM,
I figured this out. Not too far off from the tut. Just things placed in slightly different areas. I will post a quick walk through after work. Let me know if you get any further with it.
What area are you getting stumped?
I’m stuck on the rendering, I’ve watched several different walkthroughs for getting the smoke system set up, and done some multiple times, but as soon as I render any frame it just appears as the emitter’s mesh. have you rendered successfully?
Hey,
Yeah rendered fine. it was more of the velocity that wasnt working for me. Got that now as well.
I dont think you assigned the material properly from the sounds of it. If you go to your smoke/fire texture and go to the Voxel Data panel, there is a field called ‘Domain Object’. Click on there are you are given a selection of all you objects. This is were you assign the smoke shader/texture to the domain for rendering. So select your domain object and hit f12 for render. That should be it. Let me know how it goes.
THIS IS AMAZING!
Really great tutorial. I love the fact you went out of your way to explain the possible problems one might encounter while making fire in blender. Great indeed.
cool tut wish you had one on fuild.
wow great tutorial thank you.
But i have one problem: my smoke is just flowing at one point and doesnt fly out –> so i dont get a real flame
.
And because Iam new to blender i have no idea why that is so .. anyone could help me ?
Hmm, maybe you did not check “initial velocity”? There may also be problems in the particle setup?
Initial Velocity is no longer in the Domain tab!
It is now located in the flow tab of the smoke plugin instead.
I don’t get it. Everything is checked, every little step but when I render nothing appears. Any idea why? I do have a lamp too.
Thanks!
thanks for your comprehensive series of tutorials!
i tried this in blender 2.56.0, r34076 and encountered some problems.
if you get a black screen when rendering, set your horizon color to white and render again.
if the smoke/fire is rendered as high-contrast black noise, you’re looking at the same bug i did:
change the domain material’s scattering value, play around with it a bit, then render again.
the result should look different. now set it back to the proposed value.
also, to get a smooth result in said version, i had to vary in the following settings:
- emitter subdivision factor: 3 (vs 2) [focuses emission]
- domain material: emit: >10 (vs 5); scattering 1.5 [higher contrast, brighter flame]
- # of particles: 3000 (vs 1500) [density of flame]
(- note raptar’s comment about initial velocity -)