It has a slightly grainy appearance due to the low sample count, more samples will give a better result. If the final animation is now rendered, we can see this, some nice wispy smoke (or steam if you prefer): The same rendered frame would look like this: We can do this by reducing the density values using a Math multiply node. This isn't bad but it might be nice to make it even thinner.
If we render a frame of this now, we see something like this:
For example, if you changed the Max value in the node to 10, any value greater than 10 received from the domain would be output as 1, instead of some value between 0.1 and 1. And you don't need to make the values match in the domain and point density node. You can change them to whatever you like. If Normalize was unchecked the point density node would output the value obtained from the domain. This is ideal for using as an input into the density port of the volume nodes. What this will do is ensure that the point density node receives a smoke value between 0 and 100 and normalizes it - that is, converts it to a value between 0 and 1. It's no coincidence that these values match. In the domain object, the smoke value which the domain outputs is set to be between 0 and 100: Now the density value is controlled by the domain smoke density.įinally, note that the Normalize switch is checked and the Min/Max values are set to 0 and 100 respectively. This outputs a lot of data but we only need the smoke density and that is output in the Density port therefore this is linked to the Density input ports of the two volume nodes. For this purpose we'll use the XP Domain Smoke/Fire/Fuel/Temp option. Now the domain has a number of outputs we can select from the Color drop-down menu. This is the domain object, so that object is dragged into the Object link field, as shown above. Look at the settings in the point density node in the right-hand pane of the node editor:įirstly we need to tell the node where to get the data it will output. There are some important points to note here. We need some way to only render the area where the smoke is and render it more densely where the smoke is densest. By itself this won't do much, it will just render the entire domain as a solid block. The material is then applied to the domain object. To render the smoke, we use an object material containing a Volume Scatter node and a Volume Absorption node added together with an Add Shader node. To keep the smoke nice and thin the xpGaseous modifier's Fuel Rate needs to be quite low in this scene, 4 was a satisfactory value. In the first example we'll aim for a thin, wispy smoke or steam without any fire. The scene used here is a basic X-Particles domain object using a sphere as the source object. For that, please refer to the X-Particles manual, video manual, and tutorials.
This page shows how to render fire and smoke with Cycles 4D, but does not cover how to set up the simulation. What Cycles 4D does is render the result, rather than using the X-Particles Gaseous material. Nothing has changed in that respect, so the quality of the simulation is not affected by Cycles 4D and any existing simulations you may have will work as they did before. It is important to remember that the actual simulation is still generated by X-Particles, using the domain object. Note that this is a quick simulation, higher-quality results are possible at the expense of longer render time. (Many thanks to Mario Tran Phuc for allowing us to use his work here.) This brief tutorial consists of three pages:Ĭycles 4D gives very good results when rendering smoke and fire from an X-Particles simulation. X-Particles and Cycles 4D: Rendering Smoke