Introduction to Smoke/Fire Simulation in Blender 2.5 – Day 3

Introduction to Smoke/Fire Simulation in Blender 2.5 – Day 3

Gottfried Hofmann on Aug 5th 2010 with 11 comments
Tutorial Details

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

This entry is part 3 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. In the 3rd part of the series we continue to prepare the hi-res setup, and we also look at tips on saving baking time and how to keep the simulation stable. Prepare to be amazed at just what Blender can do for free!

Techniques covered in this third video include :

  • Analyse the effects of additional hi-res divisions.
  • Save render time by creating a tight domain.
  • Keep your baked data safe.
  • How to Avoid problems related to the particle system.

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 3 in a series – Go to Day 1, and Day 2.

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By Gottfried Hofmann

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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Discussion 11 Comments

  1. Andreas Galster says:
    August 6, 2010 at 6:58 am

    Does this already cover the new improvements and/or if not, are you going to cover them as well?

    Reply
    • Scott says:
      August 6, 2010 at 8:56 am
      Author

      It does not cover the new improvements, but works with them as well. It covers tips and tricks for saving time when going HiRes.

      I am going to cover the new improvements in later tuts, though :)

      Reply
  2. James F says:
    August 6, 2010 at 6:31 pm

    Thanks, this is brilliant!

    http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y58/round3/My%203d%20stuff/output.gif
    One I made :D

    Reply
  3. Tobey says:
    August 16, 2010 at 3:11 pm

    Thanks for the great tutorials Scott. Talking about long render times, do you have any experience using renderfarms to speed up the process, like renderfarm.fi etc?
    One thing I don’t like about “faking” fire in Blender using smoke simulation is that at the beginning you always get that weird “puff” of smoke, which looks more like an explosion of smoke rather than ignited fire. Just like in James’s example (nice work BTW)! Any go-arounds for that?
    Cheers

    Reply
    • Scott says:
      August 16, 2010 at 5:59 pm
      Author

      Hey Tobey,

      the problem with renderfarms and fire is that you need to bake on the farm. And the time you need for baking becoms interesting when RAM usage jumps through the roof. On the distributed ones you usually don’t have lots of machines with 8 or 16 gigs of RAM while the commercial ones charge a lot for RAM usage…

      I investigated a workaround for the said problem with the “puff”. Still need some more time to dive into it. Maybe I will be able to post a quick tip about it sometimes…

      Cheers,
      Scott

      Reply
      • Tobey says:
        August 19, 2010 at 5:44 pm

        I see. The reason I asked is that many of the tasks involved in dealing with physics require so much time to complete or knowledge about how to reduce the need for calculating power by adjusting different settings, otherwise it becomes a rather painful process of learning that can last many hours before coming up with a desired result and with many in-between waiting gaps. Though, I guess this is more related to the display in 3D view rather than final, local or distributed, render.
        Thanks for the explanation though and good luck on getting rid of that smoke-specific puff ;-)
        Cheers,
        Tobey

  4. ace says:
    June 13, 2011 at 2:03 pm

    hi watch the tutorials hope u guys show me how to create explosion soon good video dough

    Reply
  5. Austin says:
    January 15, 2012 at 11:43 pm

    I can’t seem to get the same amount of density the smoke has at “11:30″ in the video. can someone help me with this problem, it’s been driving me crazy, because i can’t figure it out!

    Reply

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