CREATING SMOKE

Like the other simulators in Blender, smoke is a very popular physics

based visual effect that people like to tinker with. To create smoke in
Blender 3D, we will learn how to create various smoke objects, find out
where settings are located and what they do, and then render some
smoke in Cycles. When we are all done, you will have learned the basics of
creating smoke and fire.
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1/10

QUICK SMOKE

Much like fluids in Blender, smoke requires the use of a domain and an
inflow. The domain controls the boundaries of the simulation and the flow
object will emit the smoke. An optional smoke object is the outflow, which
will remove smoke from the domain.
To quickly generate these objects, we will be using the quick smoke
function. This saves you a bit of time when it comes to adding objects and
applying the initial smoke settings to them. To use this function, select the
object that will emit the smoke (I'm using the default cube), press the
spacebar in the 3D view window, type in 'quick', and select Quick Smoke.
You should see a new wireframe box appear. This is the smoke domain.
Scale the domain up by a factor of 2 (S -> 2) and move along the Z-Axis
by 3 units (G -> Z -> 3). I also scaled the emitter by a factor of 0.5 (Select
the emitter -> S -> 0.5). This will give us a bit more room to work with.
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2/10

DOMAIN SETTINGS

If you select the domain and go to the physics panel of the properties
window, you will see a wide array of settings to play with. The first setting
I always change is the Smoke Adaptive Domain. Until I get to my final
render, I always have this turned on because it helps speed up the baking
by skipping calculations in areas of the domain that have little to no
smoke.
The drawback is the possibility of cutting out some smoke. The Threshold
setting and the Margin setting can be used to change the amount of
smoke that might get skipped over. A higher margin or a smaller threshold
will result in less smoke being skipped over, but take longer to bake. The
vast majority of the time, I just stick with the default settings.
After that, I make sure the Smoke High Resolution is turned off. Having
this on will cause Blender to take much longer to bake your smoke.
Usually I will keep this off until I have the general movement of the smoke
complete. This is especially important if your computer takes a very long
time to bake smoke.
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3/10

THE FIRST BAKE

To see your smoke, you can hit the play button in the timeline window. The
first time through, the animation will play slowly because Blender must
calculate the smoke physics. After that, the animation will run faster
because Blender will remember the calculations until a smoke setting is
changed.
You can also use Smoke Cache. The smoke cache is in the Physics panel
when you have the Domain selected. To bake your smoke, hit the Bake
button and let Blender work its magic. If you need to re-bake, you can
create a new slot by clicking on the plus button or by pressing Free Bake
and then hitting Bake again. I tend to prefer using multiple slots as it
allows me to compare different settings. When done baking, you can
watch your smoke by pressing the play button in the timeline window.
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4/10

SMOKE MOVEMENT

To change the movement of your smoke, select the smoke emitter and go
to the physics settings. In here, the Density, Temp. Diff, and the Flow
Source settings will alter the movement of your smoke. A higher Temp Diff
and/or Density will make your smoke rise faster.
The Flow Source settings lets you emit from the mesh itself or with
particles. I won't use particles in this tutorial, however, the process is
simple. Set up particles to move however you like, change the Flow
Source setting for the smoke emitter to particle system, and the smoke
will emit from the particles, assuming your particles are within the
domain.
Now select the domain and look at the smoke section. Most of the settings
in the smoke section of the Physics panel are useful for smoke movement.
The Time setting allows you to speed up and slow down the simulation.
Density and Temp Diff are used to increase or decrease the strength of the
Density and Temp Diff values for the emitter. Negative values here will
make smoke go down rather than up. Finally, vorticity makes the smoke
more turbulent and move a bit more randomly.
I highly recommend simply playing around with each of these settings to
see what they do for yourself.

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5/10

SMOKE APPEARANCE

Now that we've looked at the movement of the smoke, let's see how we
can alter the appearance. Select the emitter again and find the Flow Type
setting. This allows you to choose between smoke, fire, and both. You can
also make it an outflow, which is only useful when you have a separate
object emitting smoke into the domain. I am going to change this setting
to Fire + Smoke.
If you tested out the Density setting in the previous step, you probably
noticed that it also effects how thick the smoke is. After the flow type, this
is probably the most important setting. The other settings of interest are
the Smoke Color and Flame Rate. Smoke Color isnt very useful if using
nodes to color the smoke, but Flame will adjust how big of a flame you
want your smoke to have, if using fire.
When you have the domain selected, the settings of interest are in the
Smoke Flames section. Each of these settings mainly adjust how much
flame is created and how much smoke is created by the flames. Again, I
recommend changing settings and testing them out to see what they do.

One last setting is the Smoke High Resolution setting. Earlier in this
tutorial, we made sure this was off, however this will make a huge
difference in the appearance of your smoke by making it much more
detailed. At the end of this tutorial, I will show a couple of renders that will
include a comparison of high and low resolution smoke.
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6/10

SMOKE IN CYCLES

To render our smoke in Cycles, start by changing the renderer to Cycles

Render and change the window layout to Compositing. With the domain
selected, check the Use Nodes setting. A couple of default nodes should
appear. Because of the Quick Smoke function, a material has already been
created. However, it has been set up for the Internal renderer, so we have
to do a bit of work.
While there are plans for a smoke node in the future, for now we have to
make use of attribute nodes to access the smoke data. So start by
deleting the Diffuse node, and add an Attribute node (Add->Input>Attribute) and change the name to density.
After that, add a Volume Scatter (Add->Shader->Volume Scatter) and a
Volume Absorption (Add->Shader->Volume Absorption) node and combine
them together with an Add node (Add->Shader->Add), as shown above. If
you want, you can add a Multiply node (Add->Converter->Math) to gain a
bit of control on how dense the smoke is. This is quite nice if you've want
to edit the density without baking again.

Changing the color in these two will alter the color of the smoke. In this
case, I left the color white. Keep in mind that your lighting will drastically
effect the coloring of your smoke. Finally, add a Mix Shader (Add->Shader>Mix) and plug the output of the Add shader into its first input. In the next
step, we'll deal with the flame.
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7/10

FLAMES IN CYCLES

To access the flame data, add another Attribute node (Add->Input>Attribute) and name it flame and plug the Fac output into the Mix shader
we made in the previous step. Then add an Emission node (Add->Shader>Emission). If you want to control the brightness of the flame, add a
Multiply node (Add->Converter->Math) before the strength input of the
Emission node, as shown above.
For the color, I've seen people use a color ramp, but here I used the
Blackbody node (Add->Converter->Blackbody). This node outputs a color
depending on the given temperature. If you check out the Wikipedia
article on blackbody radiation you can see the color scale that it
generates. Perfect for fire!
Unfortunately, you cannot just plug the Flame data into this node without
adjusting the numbers. The flame attribute gives you values from zero to
one, but we need values in the 1000s. This is what the Multiply and Add
nodes do.

The multiply node will adjust the range of temperatures our flame will
have. Here, it changes the range from 0 to 1 into 0 to 3000. The add node
shifts the temperatures up. In this case, it changes the range to 1500 to
4500. If you take a look at the scale in the Wikipedia article, you'll see that
this gives us a range of red-orange to a white-orange.
Finally, don't forget to take the output of the Mix shader and plug it into
the Volume input of the Material Output shader.
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8/10

RESULTS

Before I end this tutorial, lets take a look at some differences between
some settings. First of all, I think it is very important to note how drastic
the changes are when High Resolution Smoke is turned on. Don't get too

attached to how your smoke looks early on if you plan on using this
setting!
Next I have some density comparisons. These were done by changing the
Value setting of the Multiply node that comes after the Density attribute
node. The higher you multiply those values the more dense your smoke
becomes. The great thing about this is that it doesn't require rebaking the
simulation to alter the density.
In the third row, the first two renders have different temperature ranges to
alter the color of the fire. I only changed the value of the Add node just to
shift the range on the color ramp. That said, you certainly aren't limited to
the blackbody color range. You can easily replace the blackbody node with
a color ramp and choose any color you like!