Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

Blender Smoke Simulation Update

29

FireOver at Blender Development we're starting to see some interesting videos as people test out the new smoke system being developed by Daniel Genrich for the 2.5 release. If you haven't been keeping an eye on the main blog, then here's a roundup of the latest developments.

There was an article about Daniel's work on the smoke simulation early last month. Since then we've seen a lot of cool videos by Daniel and other users all around the world. Take particular note of the final video in this list, by magiciandude - the composite smoke test, it has a very cool demonstration of the smoke simulation in practice, plus plenty of demonstrations.

Keep in mind this is still in development, builds can be found to download on graphicall.org (any revision of 2.5 after 22053 has smoke built in)

Throughout August we've been seeing a lot of speedups, see the graph below, Daniel's managed to get a 400% speedup reported in one blog post, due to usage of the Preconditioned conjugate gradient method (of course!)

smoke-speed2

(The green line is the current speed, lines above are past speeds)

Heres the roundup of video demonstrations:

Multiple puffs of smoke:

Tube1

Youtube link / Blog post

Comparison between heavy and normal smoke settings:

Video2

Blog post

A user's test using fire with smoke:

Video3

Youtube link / Blog post

Explosion test:

Video5

Blog post

Dissipating smoke:

Video6

Blog post

Comet:

Video7

Youtube link / Blog post

Multiple smoke flows:

Video8

Youtube link

Smoke composite test by magiciandude:

Video4

Youtube link / Blog post

29 Comments

  1. How are people rendering this stuff?

    the composite, that is. I thought it wasn't coded in. Regardless, this stuff is awesome - I'm assuming fire has to be separately done to smoke though?

  2. Volumetric rendering is now in the 2.5 branch so smoke can actually be rendered, which I believe was used to create the fire/smoke simulation.
    The composite test and many of the others were actually captured from the 3d window as the volumetric rendering was not in when that they were done.

  3. Alex Delderfield (AD-Edge) on

    @ an ancient egg

    Looks like for the composite video the maker has not rendered it, but instead taken a screen capture or something with the background completely green. It looks that way from the behind the scenes bit at the end anyway. :)

  4. ....after the 2.5 release we will see millions and millions of booms, explosions, Asteroid impacts, exploding Planets and ships... trust me!!!!
    But this stuff looks amazing!

  5. Benjamin Kay (formerly hitechboy722 / HTB) on

    .Blends would be useful about now... I really want to find out how you can achieve smoother results amongst other questions.

  6. The last video, the smoke compositing text by magiciandude is simply amazing! Its nice to see how this smoke could look in a real scene, not just in the simulator.

    One thing that I haven't seen yet in these videos, though, is colored smoke. We need to be able to color the smoke different shades, and even better have different smokes of different shades and mix them together.

  7. Check the blender artist forums for blends... There is also a example blend on that site (thought it always crashes any build of 2.5 I use on ubuntu...)
    Kory

  8. The composite had flaws. At the moment the smoke appears the fan on the left (the only other thing that is moving there) freezes. At that moment too you could see a head sticking out on the right side (hmm... from an early frame?). The smoke does not cast shadows and the lighting of the smoke does not blend with the lighting of the room (there is no way to render smoke yet?). Still the simulations is very cool.

  9. @ralmon - the smoke simulator was not connected to the renderer when that composite video was made, so with that in mind I think it's a very good job with a realtime screencapture!

    The volumetric renderer and smoke are now connected though.

    http://vimeo.com/6141503 - my not-so-exciting test

  10. That's great news! I'll download a new version as soon as possible....Now, I hope somebody finaly gets to develop a Character Studio like feature for Blender. That would be awesome and time-saving. =D

  11. @ Kory Prince: The example blend is no longer compatible with latest blender 2.5.
    Please be aware that there is no such thing as backward compatibility in the blender 2.5 svn pre-alpha versions.

  12. @Daniel Genrich
    I know this thread is a bit old but I just wanted to note:
    I wasn't talking about the example blend on the blog. There is a thread on blenderartists that has some blends that still work.
    Kory

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement