Mantaflow Fire & Smoke Simulation Guide in Blender 3D

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Fire and Smoke Simulation guide in Blender. This course is for anyone wanting to learn how to create realistic smoke and fire effects in Blender 4.5. It is specifically designed to take you from being a complete beginner to being able to create any type of simulation that you want. The course starts out by understanding what the fire and smoke simulation is and how to use it on a basic level. From there, we'll be jumping into the settings and covering each one with the visual side by side comparisons, so it's easy to understand. After that, we'll learn about the shading workspace and how to create smoke and fire shaders in both EV and in cycles. Help everything really sink in, there are five full tutorials where we use the fire and smoke simulation to create interesting animations and renders. The first one is about creating mist and blender. We'll go through the process of changing the smoke settings to get that misty effect, adding a light material, and then rendering it out. The second tutorial is how to properly render fire and EV. We're going to go through the EV render engine, talking about all the different settings to get realistic results. And the third tutorial is a campfire scene. We'll first add the campfire model, which is included in this course, simulate the fire and smoke, add the spark particles, create the materials, and adjust the render settings to get the most realistic campfire possible. The fourth tutorial is all about explosions. We'll be simulating this missile crashing down and exploding step by step. We'll learn about animation, particle systems, simulating two different types of smoke and much more. Last but not least, the final tutorial is about creating the satisfying glowing smoke effect inside a glass sphere. We'll cover simulating smoke inside collision objects, creating glowing materials, and then rendering it out in EV. If you are interested in learning everything there is to know about the fire and smoke simulation and how it works in Blender, hit that enrollment button and let's get started. 2. Downloading Blender: Everyone. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can download a Blender 4.5. First, you're going to open up a browser and then go toblender.org, and you should see a big button right in the middle of your screen that says download. Go ahead and select that. Then from here, you're going to want to click on this blue button that says Download Blender. This will automatically start a download and then there is an option for you to donate to the Blender fund if you would like to. Once the installer has finished downloading, you can open up your Downloads folder and then just double click on this and then go through the process of installing Blender. Once you've done that, you're good to go and you'll be able to open it up. 3. Blender Basics: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to cover the very basics of blender. We're going to go over moving around the three D view port, the different views, solid view, rendered view, how to move, scale and rotate objects. All of the very basic things that come with blender, we're going to cover in this video. So if you are a complete beginner, this is the video for you. Before we get started, I want to mention that if I ever use a shortcut throughout this course, you can always look at the bottom left and see what shortcut that I press, and you can see the mouse buttons as well. For example, if I left click, you're going to see that it displays the left click right there. Same thing for middle mouse and then right click, as well. Shortcut keys, you can see it displays there. If I press N, you can see this. I'll open up the properties panel, and it'll display it on that bottom left corner. Now, before we get into this video, I want to quickly mention the different render engines that Blender has to offer. We can see the render engines by going over to the render panel, which is this option here. It looks like a camera. If you select it, you can see the render engine is displayed here. The default one in Blender is EV. Now, IV is a real time render engine. This means you can move around your scene in real time. You can see the materials lighting. All that is calculated pretty quickly. Cycles, on the other hand, is Blenders physically based path tracer for production rendering. It's designed to create very realistic results right out of the box. Workbench is not really used for rendering. It's mostly used for previewing your scene or your model that you're currently working on. It won't really display lighting or shadows that well. So as you're working, you can use the workbench. It does have some nice features in the three DV port. But when you're ready to render, I highly recommend switching to EV or to cycles. Here we are in a brand new scene and blender, and this is what you're going to see right when you launch the program. Now, there is a lot to this. There are so many different menus, values to look at. Let's just go through it one by one. Before I show you how to navigate around the three D view port, let's understand what we're looking at. So right in the middle of our screen, this is what we call the three D view port. This allows us to see our scene, what it's going to look like. The different models and objects that are inside are going to be displayed in this three D viewport. On the left side, we have our toolbar. There are a bunch of different tools that we can use to move objects around, add objects, scale, all that kind of stuff. On the top here, we have our workspaces. Right now, we're using the layout one, but there's also one for modeling, sculpting, animation, rendering, all that kind of stuff. We can see the default ones here. You can also add new workspaces by hitting that plus sign as well, and you can add the ones that you want. Down at the bottom, this is our timeline. This is for the animation data in our scene. We can see the timeline is displayed here. We can see the start frame and end frame, how long our animation is going to be. On the right side, this is our properties for our blender file. Here we can change different values for our cube that we have in the middle of our scene. We can add modifiers, physics, materials. All of these different panels that you see here are selectable, and you can see what they do. We'll be covering a lot of these in the score, so don't worry about them right now. And then above that, this is the outliner. This displays every single object that we have in our scene. We can see the three that we have here, a camera, a cube, and then a light. And they are placed in a collection. And you can think of collections as different layers in your scene. You can turn them off and on by clicking the little eye right there. You can see all of our objects disappeared. Then I can re enable it by clicking it there. I can also disable it, and this will make sure it doesn't interact with the rest of the scene with that checkbox. And then you can also hide it from the render by selecting the camera icon. So if we were to do a render, these objects are not going to show up if this is unchecked. And above that is the scene collection. The scene collection holds every single collection that's going to be in our scene. So now that we have a basic overview of what we're looking at when we open up Blender, let's learn how to move around the three D viewport. Now, to move around the three D viewport, there are a couple of different ways to do this. The middle mouse but is what you're going to be using most of the time. You can see here, if I hold the middle mouse but and I click and drag, you're going to be able to view your model and you can rotate around using your mouse. Now, some mouses don't have that middle mouse button, and what you can do to help that is you can emulate it. Back in our user preferences, underneath the input tab, there's an option for Emulate three button mouse. If we enable that, now what's going to happen is if we hold the Alt key or the option key on a Mac and then leftClick, that's going to do the exact same thing. You can see here I'm holding the Alt key, and if I left click, we can move around the three D view. If you do have a middle mouse button, though, I don't recommend turning this on because Alt is used for a lot of other things. But since I have a three button mouse, I'm going to uncheck that so I can actually use the middle mouse button to move around. Now, to zoom in and out, you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse. Another way is to hold control and then middle mouse button, and that'll allow you to zoom in at a smoother rate as you can see here. You can also pan the view by holding this shift key and then middle mouse button, and that'll pan the view like this. And another thing to keep in mind is the orientation of where you're currently looking. You can see here if I pan the view all the way out here, now we're kind of looking in this direction, and it's kind of hard to see that cube over there. And now we're stuck here. So what we would have to do is hold the shift key and then bring the orientation back to where the cube is. So now we can see we're looking over here. I'm going to rotate this way a little bit, and now we're kind of looking at the cube like this. Another way to get back to your scene is, for example, if I go way out here and I'm kind of stuck and I don't really know how to get back, you can hit the period key on your number pad. And that'll zoom in on the object that you have selected. Another way if you don't have a number pad is you can go over to view down to frame selected, and this will do that exact same thing and bring your orientation back to whatever you have selected. So that's a very easy way to zoom in on different objects or to get back to your scene if you've gone really far out. Now, speaking of selecting objects, we can see our current selection is the cube, and it's highlighted with that orange outline. You can select different objects just by left clicking on them. We can see now we've selected the default lamp or the camera we can select it. You can select multiple objects by holding this shift key and then left clicking. And now you can see we have multiple objects selected. One important thing to remember is the active object. The active object is the object that was selected last, and it's highlighted with the lighter orange. You can see the cube and the lamp are with a darker orange, and then the camera is a lighter orange color. This means it's the active object. If you hold Shift, you can change the active object to the other objects as well. Now, the cube is the active object. To deselect everything, we can press Alt or option if you're on a Mac and then hit A. You can also press A to select everything in your scene, and then double type A is another way to deselect everything. That we know how to move around our scene and select objects, let's talk about scaling, moving and rotating different objects. Let's select the cube by left clicking on it. To move an object around, you can hit the G key, and this is going to move the object based on where you're looking. So you can see here I'm moving it around like this. But if I move to this side, we can see here it's moving around based on the view that I'm looking at the object. Now you can lock movement two different axis. There are three different axes in blender. The X axis, which is the red going across this way, left and right, the Y axis is the green going front and back, and then the Z is up and down. But we can't see that unless we enable it. We can enable it by going over to this button here on the top and then selecting Z. So now we can see the Z, and that is going up and down. To move objects around, we can hit the G key, and then if we want to lock it to a certain axis, we can press the axis that we want. For example, Y. Now it's locked to the Y axis, and it will only move front and back. You can also right click and that'll cancel an action. So if I press G and I don't want to move it, I can right click and it'll snap back to its original position. You can also type in different values for moving objects. For example, if I press G, and then I lock it to the Z axis, I can hit two, and now it's moved up to meters. To undo something, I can press Control Z or Command Z. Now that is how you move objects around, and to rotate objects, you can hit the R key on your keyboard and that'll start to rotate. Now, again, this is going to rotate based on the position of where our viewport is. You can also lock rotation to a certain axis as well. So if I press R, then X, I can lock it to the rotation of the X axis. Scaling works exactly the same way as rotating and movement. If I press the Sky, I can scale my cube up and down. I can lock it to a certain axis. You can also overwrite the axis by changing it to the X or to the Y just like that. And if I want to cancel that movement, I can right click. Rotating and scaling is also based on the origin point of your object. The origin point is that little orange dot right in the middle. Every object in blender has an origin point, and basically it's the center of that object. You can also change the origin point by going into edit mode. This is a mode that allows you to edit individual vertices. For example, though, if I select everything by hitting A and I move it over to the side, now the origin point is right there instead of in the middle. So now if I rotate, it's going to rotate based on that origin point just like that. Now let's say that we wanted to add a different object to our scene and we don't want to work with the cube. We can delete it by hitting the X key and then selecting delete objects, and it's going to delete the objects that we have selected. If we want to add a new object, we can press Shift A or go over to the Add menu right here and selecting different objects. I like using the shortcut Shift A. I find it a lot faster. We can add in a new mesh object, and let's select the UB sphere. Now we've added a new object into our scene, and we can see it right there. Now, where it's added is based on the position of our cursor. You can move the cursor around by selecting the cursor button here, and now if we just left click anywhere on our scene, the cursor will move to that position. Another way to move the cursor is if you hold the shift key and then right click, that'll do the same thing. And then if you wanted to get exact places for our cursor, we can press the enkey to open up the Properties tab, and then underneath the view option, we can change the rotation and the cursor location right here. I'm going to press N to close off that panel. Let's press X and delete that UV sphere. Another way to center the cursor is if you press Shift C, that's going to snap the cursor back to the original origin of the entire world. Now, when you're working in blender, a lot of the time, you're going to want to go into certain views in order to rotate or move or edit different objects. And to go into those views, we can hit the number key one on our number pad, and this is going to push us into the front view. Now I can hold Shift and middle mouse if you pan the view, and now we're looking directly in the front view of our object. If we wanted to look on this side on the right, we can press three on our number pad, and that's going to move it to the side view. Seven on the number pad will go into top view, and then you can also press Control seven, and now we're looking at the bottom view. If you don't have a number pad, what you can do is go over to view and then select the view port, and then you can choose the ones that you want here, and you can see the shortcuts on the right side. Now, working in the menus can be a little bit annoying and take a long time. So another way to do that is to again emulate. Remember when we emulated the middle mouse but, you can do that for the number pad as well. We can go over to Edit down to your preferences. Underneath the IMPA tab, we can turn on Emulate Numpad. So now what happens is if I hit the key one, that's going to go into the front view. And even though it says number pad on the side here, I'm using the top row of numbers on the top of my keyboard. So again, three is to go into the side view. Control three will go into the other side. Control one will look from the back, and so on. Memorizing the shortcuts for these s is very vital for working in blender, and it'll save you a lot of time. Since I have a number pad, though, I'm going to uncheck that emula numpad because the top row is used for other things. Now earlier in this video, I press Tab to go into Edit mode with the object that we have selected. And what this does is it changes our view, and now we can see the individual vertices on our different objects. You can go into this view by again, hitting Tab, or you can come up to this menu and selecting Edit Mode right here. Now, right now we are in the vertice select mode, so we can select the individual vertices on our different objects. Also different ways to select. Up here on the top here, we can see if I change it to the middle one, this is the edge select mode. So now we're selecting different edges on our mesh, and then the last one is the face select mode. So all of the different faces we can select like this. You can change between these different modes by hitting the top row on your keyboard, so one will change it to the verticee, two is for the edge, and three is for the face select mode. So in edit mode, let's say I wanted to make the head right here a little bit taller. I can select holding shift multiple different faces like this. And then if I hit the G key, that's going to allow me to move the different faces. As you can see here, if I wanted to lock into the Z axis, I can do that. I can rotate it. All of the different moving and scaling options in object mode also work in edit mode. Can also press E, and that's going to extrude those faces in the direction that they're facing. You can see here this is at a slight angle. So if I press E to extrude, it's going to extrude it at that angle as you can see. Now, you can change this if you want to. Let's say I hit E and I want to go straight up rather than an angle, I can press Z, and this will go into free form, and then I can hit Z again, and now it's going to lock it to the Z axis. Then if I wanted to undo, I can press Control Z a couple times. There are also different modes of editing your object. If we go back over to this menu, we can see there is sculpt mode, vertex, weight paint, and texture paint. Sculpt mode is for sculpting your objects. Over on the left side, you have a ton of different tools. And if I just start clicking on here, we can see we're now sculpting our mesh. There is also vertex paint mode, which allows you to paint on the individual vertices, which can be used for different modifiers, texturing, all that kind of stuff. Weight paint is also very useful. It allows you to paint on the different faces and vertices, giving them values, which then can be used for modifiers, simulations, all that. Texture paint allows you to paint certain textures on your mesh. This is very useful for making different details on your models and adding some cool unique textures. Now let's talk about the different views in blender. I'm going to first add in a plain object. I'll scale it up a little bit, and then I'll press Shift A and add in a cube object. Now we have two different mesh objects in our seat. If I press Z, I can go into wireframe. What this will do is it allows us to see through our mesh and everything has now turned into a wireframe. This is going to be very useful for seeing through your mesh to select an object that's behind it or to go into Edi mode and interact with the different faces and vertices that are hard to see. If I press Z, we can also see the material preview will allow us to see what the material is on our object. Since everything doesn't have a material, it's just going to be displayed as white. You can also press Z and go into the rendered view. This will allow us to see what our object is going to look like once we actually render out an image. This calculates the lighting. You can see the lamp is casting a shadow. If I move the lamp around, it's going to move the shadow based on the position of the lamp. You can also go into these different views by selecting the ones up top here. The left one is wireframe, solid material, and rendered view. We've gone into the properties many by hitting N a couple times, so let's talk about it a little bit more. If we go over to the item tab here, we can see the position and rotation and scale and dimensions of the object that we have selected. If we select the plane, we can see the scale, the dimensions here. If we rotate it, you can see it's going to be rotated. Those values are going to be displayed there. And this can be very useful for finding different angles of your objects and seeing exactly how big or small they are. Now, lastly, before the video ends, let's talk about the timeline. The timeline down here is how long your animation is going to be. You can play it by hitting the play button here, or, again, you can hit the space bar, and that'll also play it as well. Now, since we have a default scene, there is no animation data. So let's do that real quick. Let's create a basic animation of the cube moving from the left side over to the right side. So what we need to do in order to get this done is we first need to restart the timeline. We need to press G on our cube. Let's lock it to the X axis, move it to the left side. Then let's add in a keyframe. Now, to add in a keyframe, we can hit the K, and we can select which keyframe that we want. Since we want our cube to move from the left side over to the right side, we want to select location. Now, if you had some animation that you wanted with the rotation, you can select that here or scale. Let's select location. So now we've added a location keyframe right there, and we can see it with that yellow dot. So on frame one, we're telling Blender, this is the position of the cube where I want it to be. So now let's jump to a different frame. Let's go over to frame 40, for example. And now if we press G, then X, we can move it to the right side. And again, we need to add in another location keyframe. So we'll press K and then select location. So now we've told Blender that on frame one, I want it to be on this side, and then on frame 40, I want it to be on this side. And so now if we restart the animation, and then if we hit the space bar ache play, it's going to move from that location over to this new location over the course of 40 frames. So that is a very basic way of animating. Let's try rotating. So on frame 40, we're going to hit K and select rotation. Now, it's not going to overwrite that keyframe. It's just going to be added to it. As you can see over on the right side, all of these values now have that yellow color. If we go over to frame 60, we can hit R, then Z, and you can also type in a manual number. So let's say I wanted to rotate this cube by 90 degrees, I can hit 90 and then enter, and now we'll need to add in another keyframe again. So we'll hit I and then select rotation. You can also select available, and that'll look at the values from the previous keyframe and see if anything is changed. Since we change the rotation, if we select available, that's going to add in a keyframe to the rotation. So now let's see what happens. We'll restart by hitting that endpoint button. You can also press Shift and then left arrow. That's going to snap the cursor back to the beginning. And now if we hit the Space Bar, we can see there, and then it rotates. So now we've created a basic animation. Now, there we go. That is a basic overview of Blender. Now, there is a lot more to blender. There's so many more things that we could talk about. But in this video, I just wanted to cover the very basics. Over the coming videos, we're going to learn more about Blender. And if you have any questions throughout this course, please let me know, and I'll respond to it as soon as possible. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you guys in the next video. 4. What is the Fire & Smoke Simulation: How do we use the fire and smoke simulation in blender to create cool explosions, smoke effects, and VFX? To answer this question, we need to understand what the fire and smoke simulation actually is. The fire and smoke simulation feature in blender is located over in the physics properties, and it is underneath the fluid option. Now you might be confused at why we're selecting fluid, and the reason for that is because the fire, smoke and liquid simulations all use the fluid system, which is known as manta flow. So keep this in mind, whenever I use the term fluid, I'm referring to the overall manta flow simulation, not just the liquid itself. There are two things that you will always need for any fluid simulation, those being a domain object and a flow object. The domain object is the container for the entire simulation. No fluid can exist outside of the domain. Another thing to keep in mind is the domain will always be in the shape of a cube, no matter what object that you use. In this example, I've set up the UV sphere to be the domain, but as you can see, the smoke is completely ignoring the shape and treating it like a cube object. For this reason, it's recommended to always use a cube for the domain. To add in a domain, first, you need to press Shift, go over to mesh, and then add in a cube object. Emptis, curves, and any other object like that will not work. It has to be a mesh. From there, you can jump over to the physics properties and select fluid. Change the type over to domain, and you're good to go. The other thing that you're going to need is a flow object. These types of objects add or remove fluid from the simulation. And again, you're going to need a mesh object for this to work. There are also three types of flow objects, inflow, which will constantly add fluid into the simulation. Geometry will only add the amount of fluid based on the mesh size. And lastly, outflow which will remove fluid from the domain. To add any of these objects, first, you need to have it selected, then head over to the physics panel, choose fluid, and switch the type over to flow. Another optional object that you can add are effectors. These act as collision objects. However, this slows down the simulation quite a bit, so it's only recommended to use them if necessary. Effectors can also be used as guides for the simulation, which is a bit more of a complicated subject which we'll tackle later in this course. Now that we know what it takes to create a simulation and blender, let's talk about what the simulation is made of. When creating smoke or fire and blender, it's made up what we call voxels. You can think of voxels as the pixels of the simulation. The smaller these voxels are, the better the simulation will be. And you can actually see these individual voxels if we set the resolution a little bit low and then bring up the density really high. Another way to see the voxels is to look at the bottom left of your domain object. You're going to see a small cube there, and this is the size of voxel for your entire simulation. The fluid physics and blender are very powerful and allow you to create almost endless simulations. As you go throughout this course, you will start to understand how to use this system effectively without having to do trial and error. If you have any questions on anything throughout this course, don't hesitate to leave a question. With that out of the way, let's jump into Blender and start learning how to create these simulations. 5. Basic Fire Simulation P1: Now that we have a really good idea of what the fire and smoke simulation is in blender, let's actually create something. In this video, we're going to go through step by step on creating this fire simulation. In the following videos, we'll learn about the smoke simulation and all of the different settings. This video is primarily focused on just the basics and we're going to go step by step. Here we are in a brand new scene and one thing I wanted to mention is that if you ever get stuck on what buttons I press or if you get confused at the shortcut or anything like that, make sure to look at the bottom left corner. You can see here if I left click, it's going to highlight that left mouse button. Same for the middle mouse button and right click. Then any keys that I press, for example, if I press N to open up the propertitab, you're going to see that displayed right there. With that said, let's create a basic fire simulation. Remember, there are two things that we need to add. We need a domain object and a flow object. The devolt cube in RCN can be our domain object, but we're also going to need a flow object. Let's press Shift A to add in an object or you can come up to the Ad menu. We're going to go over to mesh, and then we're going to add in a UV sphere. If we press N to open up the properties tab, you're going to see the dimensions on the right side. I'm going to set all of these values down to one just so that the sphere is a little bit smaller. Next, we're going to press Control or Command A to bring up the apply menu and we want to apply the scale. You can see over on the right side, these scale numbers are set to 0.5 for each of these, and that's because we shrink everything by half. If we leave them at 0.5, the smoke and fire simulation isn't going to be exactly perfect. We want to make sure whenever we're working with physics in blender, that we apply the scale. Doing that, if we press Control or Command A, we can select scale, and that's going to change all of those values down to one. The reason we do this is because the scale value affects all other different types of things in blender. For example, modifiers, you'll see here the bevel modifier with a weird scale, it's not going to bevel the corners properly. When we apply the scale, now it bevels the corners perfectly fine. That's the same thing with these fire simulation. If we don't apply the scale, there may or may not be some weird scaling issues when we simulate it. Next, we're going to select our cube object. This is going to be our domain. We're going to press S to scale. We'll scale it up just a little bit to around 0.1 0.7. To see how big it is compared to our UV sphere, we can go into the wireframe view by selecting this top button or pressing Z and going into the wireframe. We'll press S again, block it to the Z axis by hitting Z, and then just scale it up just a little bit, and then we can press G and Z to move it upwards. Let's move it up right about there. Looks pretty good. Again, since we scaled it up, we need to press Control A and apply the scale. Next, to create the domain, what we're going to do is jump over to the physics properties. It's this little button on the side here looks like a circle with a.in the middle. We're going to select fluid, and for the type, we're going to switch it over to domain. There are two different domain types here, and currently the default one is set to gas, which is what we want. Next to add in the flow object, we're going to select the UV sphere, select fluid, change the type over to flow, and for the flow type, we're going to go with fire. In the last video, we discussed flow behavior. Right now it's set to geometry, but we want to change it to inflow, it constantly adds fire into the scene, change it over to inflow. Let's work on the domain settings first and then we'll jump over to the flow object. Go ahead. Let click the domain, the first thing that we're going to do is change the resolution divisions. We're going to talk about all of these different settings here in the later videos and we'll go into more detail on exactly what they do. For now, though, basically, all you need to know is the resolution divisions controls how good the simulation will look. If you have a lower NPC, I recommend going with a value of 128. That will look pretty good. Or if your computer can handle it, we're going to go up to a value of 160. Next, we're going to scroll down a little bit and then turn on adaptive domain. What it will do is it'll shrink down the domain to be the exact size of our flow object, as you can see here. With this unchecked, when we bake in the simulation, it's going to try and bake in the entire domain, which is just most of the time empty space. Turning this on, which will decrease the bake time by quite a bit. That's a very useful setting to have on. Next, we're going to scroll down a little bit more, open up the fire tab, and set the reaction speed, we're going to go a little bit lower 2.7. Reaction speed controls the height of the flames. Lower values will increase the height of the flames and higher values will decrease the height. We're setting it a little bit lower so the fire is a little bit taller. Next, we're going to turn up the vorticity. This value controls the amount of swirls and randomness in the flames. We're going to go up to a value of 0.6. Finally, over here in the cache settings, here is where we bake in the simulation. Right now, the type is set to replay, which means when we play the animation, it's going to try and simulate it in real time. This is quite laggy, especially at a resolution of 160. I'm going to switch the type from replay over to modular and this will allow us to actually bake in the simulation, as you can see here. The other important thing we want to turn on is the is resumable option. What this will do is it'll allow us to pause the bake halfway through, double check that everything looks good, and then resume it afterwards. If this is unchecked, when we stop the bake, if it's not completely finished, you're going to have to restart and bake the entire thing. Having this on is a really good option. The end frame right here also controls how long the simulation is going to be. Let's go with a value of 150 frames. Now that we set up the domain, let's select our flow object. Over on the right side, we want to make sure that the philic behavior is again set to inflow. For the fuel, we can go up just a little bit to 1.2. This will make the fire look a little bit more chaotic and then we're going to open up the flow source. We're going to set the surface emission a little bit lower. Let's go with a value of one. This will bring the fire a lot closer to the surface of the mesh. Finally, we're going to turn on the texture option. Here is where we can add in a texture to control where the fire is on our object. With that enabled, we're going to jump over to the texture panel, create a new texture, change the type from image or movie, we're going to go with clouds. You can see here this is what the texture looks like. Wherever there is white on this texture, that is where there's going to be fire and wherever there is black, there's going to be no fire. We're going to bring the size down to around 0.1, and then for the colors, we're going to bring up the contrast to around 2.5 or so. Something like that will look pretty good. Now, unfortunately, there's not really a way to see this texture on our mesh, we're just going to have to bake it in and then see it afterwards. The last thing that we're going to do before we bake this in is we're going to animate the offset, which means that the texture is going to be moving around our mesh as the simulation plays, which will give us a much more random and organic look. To do this, on frame one, we're going to hit the button on the sign to add in a keyframe. We're going to jump all the way to frame 150, which is the end of the animation. We're going to go up to a value of 0.7 and then add in another keyframe. Over the course of 150 frames, you're going to see this value will slowly increase until it reaches 0.7 right at 150. The other important step that we want to do is we're going to box select both of these keyframes because right now the interpolation between these keyframes is set to bezier, which means it's going to start out slow at the beginning, speed up in the middle, and then slow down right at the end. This is going to make the texture look a little bit weird. To make it move at a constant rate, make sure both of them are selected, press T while hovering in the timeline and select linear. Now it's going to move at a constant rate. We can also set the end frame in the timeline to 150 to match the length of our animation. There we go. Let's go ahead and select our domain object. We're ready to bake this in. Make sure you save your project just in case this crashes. You can do that by hitting Control S, navigate to where you want to save it, and then click on Save Blender File. With that done, let's click on Bake. Once the Bake is finished, we're going to create the material and then render it out. 6. Basic Fire Simulation P2: Now that the bake has finished, we can scroll through the timeline and double check that everything looks good in our simulation. As you can see, it does. If we zoom in on this UV sphere, you'll be able to see that texture working and moving around our mesh as the simulation plays, which is pretty interesting. So the next part in this tutorial is to create the material and then render out an animation. The first step to that is positioning the camera so we can actually see what we're doing. I'm going to go into the front view right about here or so and then what we can do is hit Control Alt Numpad zero to snap the camera to exactly where we're looking. Or you can come up to view down to a line view and then select a line active camera to view. That does the exact same thing. From there, we can select our camera, press G, and then middle mouse button to Zoom outwards. Something like that will look pretty good. Now, if we press Z and go into the rendered preview, we're not going to see anything and that's because there's no material right now. It's just using the default gray texture for our cube. What we need to do to fix that is to jump over to the material tab. What we want to do is over on the right side, we want to remove this principled BSD. Go ahead and select it and hit remove. Underneath the volume tab, we're going to add in a new shader and add in a principled volume shader. Once we do this, you'll be able to see our smoke simulation. Now, it might be a little bit hard to see, but if we were to turn up the density on our smoke, you'll be able to see it in our scene, as you can see there. That is looking pretty good. There are a couple of different things I want to change in this material and to make things a little bit easier, let's go over to the shading workspace. Come up to the top here and select shading. I'll go back into the camera view by hitting zero on my number pad and press Z and go into the rendered view. So here is our nodes setup for our material. Right now we set the density to 15. We're going to set this down a little bit to around ten. Now to bring in that fire, there's multiple ways to do this. One way is to bring up the black body intensity. If we select this and go up to a value of five or so, you're going to see our fire simulation is in the scene. However, it looks a little bit low quality. There's not a lot of detail in our simulation. If we go into the solid view, we can see all of this detail. But once we go into the rendered view, it seems to disappear. The main reason for that is because of a couple of settings in EV, but also because of our black body intensity. I don't really like using this setting. The better way to add in our fire is if we press Shift A, we're going to go over to input and then add in a volume info node. We're going to place that right here. We're going to be taking the flame attribute and plugging that into our principled volume. First though, we need to add in a couple of extra nodes. We're going to go over to converter and then add a color ramp node. Take the flame and plug it into the bottom input. Then we're going to take the color and plug this into the emission strength. To control the brightness of this, we're going to add a math node, converter math node, place that right here and switch the type over to multiply. This bottom value now controls the brightness of our flames. Let's go with a value of around 35. This color ramp also gives us a little bit more control over where the fire is on our scene. For example, if I bring this down, we can clam down on some of those values, as you can see. To actually get some color into our flames, we're going to add in a new color ramp by selecting this one, pressing Control Shift D to duplicate it. That's going to keep the connection to the flame attribute, and we're going to take the color and plug this into the emission color. Then for the color down here, we're just going to add in a new handle by hitting that plus sign, select it and change it over to a nice orange reddish color, something like that. Then for the white handle, change this color to a brighter yellow color. Somewhere around here will look pretty good. Then you can play around with the location of these handles to get some interesting results. That looks pretty good. Now before we do anything else in this material, I want to fix the EB settings because right now our flame still does not look that good. What we're going to do first is jump over to the render scene panel, which is the camera icon. We're going to open up the volumes tab. Here we can set the resolution of our volumes. Right now it's at 1.8, which is the lowest resolution. We're going to go with a value of 1.2. Once we do that, you're going to see a lot more detail in our scene. Next, we're going to open up the color management tab. We're going to change the view transform from AGX over to filmic. I noticed that filmic does look a little bit better with flames. You can see a lot more color in our flames right here. Then for the look, we're going to go with high contrast. This is going to really make our fire stand out. Next, over in the principled volume, we might want to bring up the density. Let's go back up to 15. I think that will look a little bit better with the smoke. Then you can also change the color of the smoke if you wanted to by changing this color here. I might make it just a little bit darker. As for the background, we're going to jump over to the world settings and set the color all the way down to black. Now you can see we're starting to get a lot more interesting results. The other thing I want to do is hide this UV sphere so it doesn't show up in the render. To do that in the outliner, all we have to do is click on that camera icon and then we can also hide it from the viewboard as well by selecting that button there. Now we get this really nice looking flame with the smoke. And that's basically all we really need to do. From here, we're going to jump back over to the layout tab, and then I'm going to show you how to render this into an animation. Over on the right side, we're going to go over to the output tab. Here is where we set our folder of where we want our animation to go to. Go ahead and click that button there and then navigate to a different folder. You can name it right here and then click except. For the file format, we're going to switch it over to a movie file. Underneath the encoding, we're going to switch it over to the MP four option. Then for the output quality, let's go with high. Normally, when you render an animation in blender, you're going to render it as a PNG or JPEG and then sequence it out later. Since though this is a pretty basic scene, there's not a lot going on. We should have no problems with crashing or anything like that, so that is why we're rendering it as an pour. In the later videos, when we create the explosion and other high quality simulations, we will be rendering it as a PNG and then sequencing it out later. I'll go over step by step once we get to those videos. For now, we're going to leave it on pour. With that done, we can go ahead and save our project once again and then go over to render and then click on Render Animation. Once it's done rendering, you're going to see it in the folder that you specified in the output section. There we go. We've now created a basic fire simulation, and then in the next video, we're going to be creating a basic smoke simulation. 7. Basic Smoke Simulation P1: Last video, we created the basic fire simulation, and in this video, we're going to be creating a basic smoke simulation. We're going to go step by step on creating this simulation that you see on screen. I'll show you how to add the domain. We're going to change a couple of settings, create the material, and then render it out with EV. To get started, we're going to be using this cube as our domain object. I'm going to go into the properties tab by hitting N and then we're going to set the dimensions over here. For the X dimension, we're going to go up to around 4 meters. From there, we're going to press G and Z and drag it up so it's sitting right on top of the credit floor. For our flow object, we're going to press Shift A, go over to mesh, and then add in a plane object. Over in the property stab, let's bring the X a lot smaller to around 0.3, and then for the Y, we're going to set this to around 0.8. We have this small plane just like that. From here, we're going to press G, then X and move it over to the right side. Again, this is going to be our flow object. Let's press G and Z and get upwards so it's not completely in line with the bottom of the domain. It's up just a little bit. There is probably good. For the height of our domain, I'm going to select it and let's just drag up the height a little bit more to maybe around 2.5 or so. Again, we're going to need to press G and Z and drag this up, so it's sitting on the grid floor just like that. There we go. Now that we have all of our objects, we need to apply the scale. I'm going to press Control A and select scale with the domain select it. We're going to select our flow object, press Control A, and select scale once again. Next, we're going to select our domain and jump over to the physics properties. We're going to select fluid, make sure the type is set to domain, and there we go. We've added it in. Before we change all of the settings, let's select our flow object, select fluid, change the type over to flow, and then make sure the flow type is set to smoke. Let's create the settings for our flow object first. For the flow behavior, we want to switch it over to inflow, so it constantly adds smoke into the scene. Next, we're going to set the initial temperature up to a value of six. This will make the smoke rise a bit faster, and then we're going to open up the flow source whenever you have a flat object like this plane, we want to make sure is planear is enabled. This plane R will allow an object that is non manifold, which in this case is our plane object. What non manifold means is if I add in a cube object, you can see this is a solid object. But if however I go into Eta mode and I create a hole, let's say, I select this pace here, inset it, and then create a hole like this, this is a non manifold object because it's not closed in. In this case, we need to make sure that with our plane selected that is planear is enabled. I'm also going to set the surface emission down to one, so it's a bit closer to the surface of the plane. And that's basically all we really need to do for our flow object. Let's go ahead and select our domain object. For the resolution divisions, let's go up to a value of 128. That'll look pretty good for our scene. Underneath the border collisions, we're going to enable the bottom of our domain. A smoke that hits the ground will actually collide with it instead of passing right through. The other thing we're going to enable is the adaptive domain. Go ahead and check this box. This should shrink the domain size to be the exact size of our flow object. Then we're going to scroll down to the gas settings. The vorticity amount controls how many swirls are in the smoke and for this simulation, we're going to go up just slightly 2.1. We're also going to enable dissolve, so the smoke dissolves over time. We're going to open up this panel and the time value controls how long it's going to take for it to dissolve. Let's go with a value of 75. Over 75 frames, it's going to slowly dissolve. Then with slow enabled, that will give it a much smoother transition. Another thing to keep in mind though, with the dissolve function, sometimes the adaptive domain actually cuts off some of the simulation. And to prevent this, we can set the threshold lower. The threshold value is the amount of density in the smoke before it gets cut off. With this at 20.2, you might get some clipping in the smoke. To prevent this, we can set this all the way down to zero. This means that even if there's a tiny amount of smoke inside the domain, it's not going to be clipped off from the adaptive domain. Next, we're going to open up the noise panel. Here is where we can add another level of detail to our simulation. Let's go ahead and turn it on. For the Ures factor, we're going to leave it at a value of two and then for the strength of this noise, we're going to go down just a little bit 2.6. I think the strength is a bit too high at the default setting, so we're going to set at 2.6. I'll be showing you what it looks like before and after after we bake this in. As for the end frame, we're going to set this down to 200. I don't think we need 250 frames. Since we've set it there, let's also set this in the timeline as well to 200. We're going to change the type from replay over to modular and this will allow us to bake in the simulation. We're going to turn on is resumable just in case we need to pause the bake. Then finally, to make our simulation look a bit more interesting, let's add in a force field. This will push the smoke in the left direction causing it to look like there's wind in the scene. To do this, we need to press Shift A, go over to force field, and then add in a wind force field. Go into front view by hitting one on the number pad and then to rotate this, we're going to press R, then hold control to snap it right at 90 degrees. Let's place this over on the right side. Now, the strength of this is way too high for our scene. We're going to set this much lower 2.3. As for the noise amount, this is going to give it a lot more variation, which is going to make it look more interesting. We're going to set the noise amount up to a value of three. With that done, we are ready to bake in our simulation. Go ahead, select your domain object. Make sure you save this as well just in case blender crashes. You can do that by hitting Control S, and once you've done that, go ahead and click on Bake data. Now this will go through the timeline, as you can see. Once this is finished, we're going to bake in the noise. The first bake has finished, so now we're going to scroll down here and then bake in the noise. Make sure you save your project once again and then click on Bake noise. 8. Basic Smoke Simulation P2: All right, both of the bakes have finished and now we can play through this and see what it looks like. As you can see, it looks pretty good. There's a lot of detail in our smoke and it is not too bad at all. Real quick, I wanted to show off the noise it does. You can see with it on, there's quite a bit of detail in the smoke and if I turn it off, you're going to see a lot less detail in our smoke. It's a lot more. The swirls and everything are a lot bigger than normal, but with it turned on, the smoke is more dense and gives us another level of detail. With that done, let's go ahead and create a scene and then render this out EV. First off, I'm going to press Shift A, go over to mesh, and then add an a plane object to be our ground floor. Let's scale this up a little bit and then go into the front view by hitting one on the number pad and double checking that it's right below the smoke right about there is good. As for the backdrop, what I like to do a lot of the time when rendering in blender is I like to go into Edit mode with the ground plane. Go into the edge select mode by selecting that up there or by hitting two on your keyboard, select the back edge and extrude it upwards by hitting E, lock it to the Z axis, and drag it upwards just like that. From here, you can select that corner and bevel it by hitting Control or Command B, moving your mouse a little bit, and then with the scroll wheel, you can add more resolution. Something like that will look pretty good. Now if we go out of Edit mode, we have a nice smooth backdrop. You can also right click and shade it smooth. Next, let's position the camera in the front. I'm going to go into front view once again by hitting one on the number pad. Position my view port right about here and then press Control Alt Numpad zero to snap the camera to place. Another way is to go up to view down to a line view and then select a line active camera to view. Then go ahead and select the camera, press G and then middle mouse button and you can zoom outwards until you get the smoke simulation in the frame. Write about there is pretty good. Then let's select our backdrop, move it over to the right, so it encompasses the entire camera view. Let's see what this looks like if we press Z and then go into the rendered view. You can see we cannot see anything. Let's go ahead and create the material for our domain object, select it, and then jump over to the material tab. Underneath the surface, go ahead and select it and then click Remove. We don't want to use any surface. We want to open up the volume tab and for the volume, switch it over to the principled volume shader. There we go. That is looking pretty good. Let's bring up the density to around 25 to see what that looks like. That is looking pretty good so far. You can also change the color if you want to. If you want it to be a little bit lighter or darker, you can play around with this until you get your desired look. You can also change it to a different color if you would like to as well. I might go with a slight blue color. Something like this might look pretty interesting. As for the lighting in the scene, let's press Shift A and add an A sun lamp. Come over to light and then add an A sun lamp right here. We're going to drag this up a little bit and then rotate it so it's facing at this angle. Then in top view by hitting seven, let's rotate it again so it's right around here. That looks pretty good. If we go back into camera view now, we're going to have some nice lighting on our smoke simulation. One thing to note with IV, you're not going to get any shadows from the smoke on the ground plane. For that, you're going to have to switch over to cycles. If I switch over to cycles now, you'll be able to see all of that shadow along the bottom there, which does look pretty good. We'll be covering rendering in cycles in a later video. For now, we're going to be sticking with EV. Speaking of which we're going to go through a couple of different settings to make our smoke simulation look a lot better. First off, we're going to open up the shadows option and then turn on volumetric shadows. This will allow some shadows in the volume to appear. You can see with it off, and then with it on, it's a subtle effect and you'll be able to see this more once we change the resolution. To do that, we're going to come down here, open up the volumes tab. The resolution is set to 1.8 and this is why it looks very blurry. If we switch this over to 1.2, we're going to get a lot more detail in our smoke simulation. The other thing I like to do is open up the color management tab and set the look over here to high contrast. That's going to give us some more sharp contrast in the scene and that looks a lot better. If you wanted to, you could go up to 1.1, but there's hardly any difference between 1.1 and 1.2. With 1.1, it significantly increases the render time. I don't think it's worth having that tiny amount of extra detail just to have double the amount of rendering. I'm going to stick with 1.2. Finally, we're going to come up to the outliner and we're going to hide the plane object, hide it from both the view and from the render. Render this, we're going to jump over to the output tab, set an output of where you want this to render to, and then click Accept. For the file format, again, we're going to stick with a movie file because this will render a little bit quicker. We're going to go with a movie file, and then underneath the encoding, we're going to set the container to MP four and then for the output quality, we're going to go with high. That done, go ahead and save your project once again and then come up to render and then click on Render Animation. This will bring up a new window and it'll start to render out. Here is the final result. As you can see, it does look pretty good. We get some nice detail in the smoke and it does not look that bad in EV. Again, this would look better in cycles, and I'll be showing you how to render smoke and fire in cycles in a later video. Thanks for watching this video and I'll see you all in the next one. 9. Using Quick Effects: Video, I'm going to show you how to use the Quick effects tool in blender. Quick effects allow you to quickly add smoke or fire, liquid, or even hair particles to your object that you have selected. How it works is you need to make sure you have an object selected, it needs to be a mesh object. Then over in the object menu down to Quick effects, you can see the four options here. The one we're going to be covering in this video is the Quick Smoke. Keep in mind when you select this option, the object that you have selected will become a flow object. If I didn't want a cube to be the flow object, I can delete this by hitting X, delete it, and then I can add in a new object. Let's go with a UV sphere. I'll scale it down a little bit and then go over to object, Quick effects, and then quick smoke. Again, this will automatically add a domain object, turn the object that we had selected into a flow object, and create a basic material. Now, before you click away, there is another menu that we need to look at and it is at the bottom left corner. If we open up this menu, you're going to see the smoke style. Right now it's set to smoke, but we can choose fire or we can choose fire and smoke. These are the exact settings in the flow type over in the inflow settings. There's also an option for render smoke objects, and what this will do is if we zoom in here, you can see our flow object is set to wireframe with this turned on, it'll become a solid object and you can actually see the surface of the mesh. I'm going to swich this back over to smoke. Another thing to keep in mind is once you click out of this menu, let's say I click over here, that menu is going to disappear. That's not really a big deal because if you wanted to change the flow type, you can just select your flow object and change it right here underneath the flow type. Again, this is a quick way to turn whatever object that you have selected into a flow object with an automatic domain. From here, what you're going to have to do is go through and change the settings how you want. You can also scale the domain up or down depending on what you want for your simulation. This option is pretty nice to quickly add a domain automatically without having to add in a cube, set it to domain and then all of that. It just saves you about a minute or so of work. 10. Domain Settings: Section, we're going to be covering the domain object. We're going to go through every single setting in the domain going step by step into different sections and covering exactly what each one does. To start out with, we're going to be covering the top settings in the domain object. To get started, let's create a domain object. Now, we've done this twice in the last couple of videos, but we'll go through it one more time. Go ahead and press S to scale our cube. We're going to scale this down and then press S and Z and scale it along the C axis so it looks like this. Then to add a domain object, there are two different ways we can do this. We can go over to the object menu down to quick effects and then add in a quick Smoke effect and this will automatically add a domain, which we covered in the last video. However, if you want to add one manually, you can press Shift A, add in a cube object, and then scale it up and place it how you want. I'm going to go into front view by hitting one on the number pad, scale this up, then press S and Z and scale it up something like this. That is looking pretty good. Then since we scaled both of these objects up, let's select both of them, press Control or Command A, and then select scale. Let's select the first cube. This is going to be our flow object. We're going to go over to the physics panel, select fluid, and change the type over to flow. For the flow behavior, we're going to go with in flow. Now we need a domain. Let's select our domain object and then click on fluid. Now you might be wondering why we're selecting fluid rather than smoke or fire. The reason for that is because the smoke, fire, and liquid simulations are all combined into this fluid option. You can see this by changing the type over here to domain and then looking at the domain type. There are two different options, gas or liquid. Gas, of course, is for the smoke and fire and liquid is for the liquid effects like water, honey, and all that stuff. I actually created an entirely other course dedicated to that topic, if you want to check it out. I'm going to go ahead and extend this panel just a little bit and here are all the settings that we're going to cover in this video. We've already covered the domain type, so let's move on to the resolution divisions. The resolution divisions control how good the simulation will look. Higher values will, of course, make the simulation look better, but it's going to take longer to bake. You can see the different resolutions and how they look in blender with the smoke and with the fire. Again, you can see that the higher resolution, it does look a lot better, but it's going to take much longer to bake. The time scale value controls the speed of the simulation. Higher values will increase the speed, making it move faster, and lower values will make it move slower. Underneath that, we have the adaptive timesteps. What this will do is it'll adaptively change the timesteps. For example, with a fast moving collision object or flow object, you might want to increase the maximum and minimum timesteps. However, if some of your simulation, you don't have a lot of fast moving objects, the adaptive timesteps will automatically change the timesteps needed for a certain frame based on these two values. Below that is the CFL number. Basically, this determines the maximum velocity that the smoke or fire will move per time step. No fluid is allowed to move faster than what this value is. If however, that value is higher, the solver will automatically subdivide that simulation step. In general, the higher this value is, the less accurate it'll be, but the lower this value is, the more accurate it will be, but it's going to take longer to bake. Below that, we have the time steps, maximum and minimum values. The higher these are, the more accurate it will be and you can see this in this example. With a lower timestep value, you're going to notice some of the particles tend to clip through the collision object. A higher one, there are no particles that are clipping through and it is accurately being simulated. Below that, we have the gravity and right now it is grade out. The reason for this is because this simulation is using the scene gravity. We can see this by jumping over to the scene properties. If we open up this gravity panel, you're going to see those exact same numbers here, 9.81. If I wanted to change the gravity in the domain settings, I need to uncheck this gravity. Now, if we jump back over to the physics panel, we can change the gravity here. Might be wondering why we would want to do that. The reason for that is because you can have multiple domains with different gravity settings. You can test this by selecting both of these objects, shift D it and move it over to the right side. This domain over here will set the z20 and then we'll bring up the Y to around eight. Now if we restart and play the simulation, you might get some glitching effect and I think the reason for that is because these two domain objects are actually sharing the same data. If we scroll down here, you're going to see the cache is exactly the same on both of these. What I would need to do is change one of these to a different folder so it's not using the same data. Let's go ahead and change the one on the left. Now if we restart and play the simulation, you're going to see the one on the right is looking good, it's moving upwards, and then the one on the left is looking like that. And there we go. That is how you can create different gravities for multiple domains. Underneath that we have empty space, and this is the clipping amount. The higher this value, the more it will clip out that smoke and consider it empty space. That is what it's supposed to do. However, if I set this all the way up to the maximum value of one, it seems to work a little bit strange. You can see it deletes the first frame and then if I restart and play it again, now it starts to simulate. This setting does seem to be a bit buggy at the moment. So for now, I would probably just leave it at the default setting and not mess with it at all. Delete an obstacle will delete any smoke that is inside an obstacle. Finally, the border collisions will allow the smoke to collide with the edges of the domain that you check off right here. Let's go ahead and check off the top and right side. Now if we play the simulation, it's going to play it. Once it reaches the top, it's going to collide with it and also collide with the right side of the domain. This can be handy, especially with explosions. If you have explosions that are on the ground, you want to make sure the smoke actually collides with the ground, having the bottom right here checked is a very good option. 11. Adaptive Domain Settings: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to be looking at the adaptive domain in the domain settings, which is located right here on the right side underneath the border collisions. With this checked, what this will do is it'll shrink the object to be the exact size that you need for your simulation. This will improve B time because it doesn't need to bake in the entire scene. You can see here this is a very large domain for a small object. If I turn the adaptive domain on, it's going to shrink it down to be the exact size that I need. If you have a flow object that moves around or the smoke is moving around in your domain, it's going to adaptively change the size based on your needs. To test this out, let's go ahead and play the simulation and you'll be able to see exactly what this looks like. Now there are three options to go through. The add resolution will add more domain, even if the size extends past the original object. You can see here if I go into Edit mode, this is the normal size of this object. If we restart the simulation and I add some more resolution, let's go with around 50. Now when we play the animation, you're going to see that even though it's this size, it's extending past it because the flow object is going outside, so it needs to add more resolution. And below that is the margin value and this is the distance between the smoke and the edge of the domain. If I bring up the margin a little bit, you're going to see extends out past where the smoke is. If I bring it lower, it's going to get closer and closer to the smoke. Finally, the threshold value is the density of the smoke at which it gets deleted. To test this out, let's open up the gas settings and open up the dissolve function and turn this on. Let's go with a value of around 15, for example. Now when we play the animation, you're going to see that even right here, it might be a little bit hard to see, but this is very low dense smoke, so it's getting deleted. Want to be careful with this threshold value because sometimes it's going to delete smoke that you don't want, which will result in some weird clipping issues. You can see this in more detail if we go up to around 0.5, for example. Now when we play the animation, you're going to see it gets cut off way sooner than I want it to. So for most cases, you can leave this at the default value, but in other cases, you're going to want to go even lower than this, maybe to around a value of zero. You can see on screen that this simulation was jittering around a little bit, making the threshold much lower to a value of zero fix that issue and now it plays smoothly. There you go. That is how the adaptive domain works. In the next video, we're going to be taking a look at the gas settings. 12. Gas Settings: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to be talking about the gas settings in the domain. The gas settings control the overall look and behavior of the smoke. The first two settings that we have here are buoyancy density and heat. These two values control how fast the smoke will rise or sink. There is also another setting in the flow objects. If we select it, the initial temperature also correlates to how fast the smoke will rise or sink. Jumping back over to the domain, let's talk about these two settings first. The buoyancy density controls how fast the smoke will rise, higher values will result in it rising faster and negative values will result in it sinking. The heat value controls the overall temperature. You can think of this just like in real life, if the smoke is cold, it's going to sink and if it's hot, it's going to rise just like a hot air balloon. The heat value and the initial temperature value go hand in hand with each other. If both of these values are set to a positive number, the smoke will rise. If one of them is set to a negative number, the smoke will sink. You can think of this as multiplication. A positive times a positive is a positive value, so it rises. If a positive times a negative, it equals to negative value, so the smoke will sink. If both values are set to a negative, this will also result in the smoke rising. Go ahead and test this out by playing the animation with both of them set to a positive number, you're going to see it rises up. Let's select the inflow and set the initial temperature to a negative value. Let's go with negative one. We'll restart and play the animation, and now you can see the smoke is now sinking. If we set the heat value to a negative number as well, now the smoke will rise because both of them are set to a negative value. Again, the higher you set this, let's go with negative five, for example, this will result in the smoke rising much faster as you can see on screen. Below that is the vorticity amount. This is the amount of swirls in the smoke. Higher values will make the smoke look more noisy and chaotic versus lower values will make it look a lot more smooth. You want to be careful about this value because sometimes the higher you set this two, it will just fill out the entire domain. I would probably stick around a value of 0.2 or lower. Below that, we have the dissolve function. If we check this box, we will now see that the smoke will dissolve over a certain amount of time. Let's go ahead and drag this inflow a little bit lower. We'll select the domain and restart it. Now we play it and you can see it is dissolving. The time value controls how fast it will dissolve. Lower values will result in it dissolving faster, and of course, higher values will make the smoke last longer. The slow checkbox allows the smoke to dissolve at a slower pace and much smoother. You can see the differences on screen with slow turned off and with it on and you can see that it's a much smoother transition if it is on. There we go. We've now covered the gas settings. In the next video, we're going to be taking a look at the noise options. 13. Noise Settings: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to be talking about the noise option in the domain settings. The noise allows you to add in another level of detail to your overall simulation. It's not going to change the shape or look of the simulation. It's just taking what is already there and then adding more detail on top of that. To see how this works, we have a basic simulation right now. When we play it, you're going to see the smoke just rises up. There's not a lot of detail going on. It only has a resolution of 32. Once we enable noise, though, you can do that by clicking that little checkbox. When we play the animation, you're going to see a lot more detail in the smoke. You can see this before and after by clicking that little checkbox. There it is before the noise and then with it enabled, you're going to see a lot more detail. Again, you can see it's not changing the shape, it's only changing the details inside the simulation. Are four settings that you can tweak in order to change the look of the noise. First off is the uppers factor. By adding more uprest factors, it's going to add more levels of detail to your simulation. The strength value controls how strong that noise pattern is going to be. Higher values will result in it being more pronounced and then lower values will make it look a little bit more subtle. The scale value changes the overall size of that noise pattern. Of course, higher values in the scale will result in the noise pattern being a lot bigger and then lower values will result in the noise being much smaller and you can see that on screen. Finally, the time value is a seed for the noise. If you don't really like how that pattern looks, you can just change the time to a random number and you're going to get a slightly different results. This setting is not that noticeable because it's just changing the noise pattern and noise is basically infinite. In general, with a low resolution divisions and a high noise factor upres, you're going to see that the simulation looks really small. Versus the other way around, if you have a high resolution divisions and a low uprise factor, this simulation is going to look a lot bigger. One more thing that we need to discuss is how do you bake in this noise? Coming down to the cache setting, in order to actually bake in the noise for a high resolution simulation, we need to change the type over to modular or all. Modular will allow us to bake in the different modules, such as the initial bake with the resolution divisions, and then we can come down here and bake in the noise. Keep in mind, in order for this to work, you need to make sure I resumable is enabled. With this unchecked, you're going to see a warning right here, non resumable cache enable resumable options first. If you were to bacon this setting here, you're not going to be able to bake in the noise until you check is resumable. If you don't want to do two different bakes like this, you can switch the type over to A, and then you'll be able to bake in the noise and the normal resolution divisions all at once. There we go. That is how the noise option works in the domain settings. In the next video, we're going to be taking a look at the fire options. 14. Fire Settings: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to be taking a look at the fire options in the domain settings. There are six different options to go through, starting out with the reaction speed. The reaction speed controls how fast the fire fuel will burn up. Higher values will result in the fuel burning faster, which makes the flames shorter. Lower values will result in the fuel burning slowly, so this equals higher flames. You can see the differences on screen with different reaction speeds and you can see what they look like. The flame smoke controls how much smoke is going to be emitted from the fire. Right now when we play the animation, you can see there is a lot of smoke, but if we wanted much more than this, we can go up to a value of three, for example. Now when we start, we're going to get much more smoke in the simulation. The vorticity amount is basically the same thing as the gas verticity. It just adds some more swirls and randomness to your flames and you can see the different settings on screen. You want to be careful with this value because if you go too high, it's just going to fill out the entire domain. Next up is the temperature maximum and minimum values. They control the height, the speed, and the overall color of the simulation. For example, with a low temperature value like a value of one and then maybe 0.5, you're going to get a much shorter flame and the color of it is going to be a dark reddish color. The other way around, if you go with a very high temperature like five and then maybe three, for example, the flames will be much taller. They're going to move much faster, and it's going to be a much brighter, whitish, yellowish color. Actually see this, let's set the temperature maximum to one and then the minimum to a value of about 0.5. Now when we play the animation, you're going to see the flames are a lot shorter and they're not moving as fast. Now, you're not going to be able to see the color difference until you work on the material. Let's go ahead and do that right now. I'm going to come up to the top right corner and split this view and then switch this over to the shader editor. Going to press do closed off that panel and here is our basic material with the principled volume. If we press Z and go into the rendered view, you're not going to really see anything and that's because we need to enable the black body intensity. Again, this value right here, the temperature maximum and minimum, they're very low. Once we set up the black body intensity up to around a value of eight, you're going to see a very dark red flame color, as you can see, just like that. Basically, what's happening is this principle volume with the attribute set right here to temperature, it's taking that temperature maximum and minimum values and plugging that into the material. If we were to just remove this, now you're going to see that it doesn't have that temperature attribute, so the entire thing breaks. If you like the look of your simulation, but you don't really like the color of it, you can actually change that with the temperature value right here. We go up to, let's say, 3,000, it's going to be a much brighter flame, but it's going to keep that overall shape. I'm going to set this back over to 1,000. Now if we set the temperature maximum up to around five and three, the flame is going to be much taller and much brighter as you can see just like that. And finally, the smoke color right here controls the look of the smoke. Let's go with a blue color. We'll restart and play this. Now you're going to see that the smoke is now a blue color. If you go into rendered view though, it's still going to be that gray color will turn up the density a little bit. In order to grab that smoke color, we need to take the color attribute and plug that in right here. In order to do that, all you have to do is type in the word color, all lowercase and then enter, and now you'll be able to see that blue smoke in your scene. We're going to talk more about materials later in this course, but for now, that's just a basic overview of how the fire option works and how to use it in the principle volume shader. 15. Domain Guides: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another video. In this one, we're going to be taking a look at guides in the fire and smoke simulation. What are guides? Well, guides allow you to take an external force or velocity and apply it to your fire or smoke or liquid simulation. There are two different methods that you can use, that being a domain object or an effector object. Effector objects means that you'll just take an object, apply an effector, and then you can move it around and affect the velocity of your smoke. Domain guides, which means you're going to take the data and velocity from one domain and apply it to another domain. For the next two videos, we're going to be covering both of those different methods. In this first video, we're going to be using a domain as a guide. Now, guides are a little bit more complicated, what we're going to do in this video is walk through step by step on how it works. If you want to follow along, you can go ahead and download this blend file. It's over in the resources. What we're going to do first is create a liquid simulation and then use that as a guide for the smoke simulation later. In this blender file, we have a basic scene setup. We have a domain, flow object, and an effector object, and then a ground plane on the background. What we're going to do first is create the domain, select it and select fluid in the physics panel, change the type over to domain, and then for the domain type, we're going to switch it over to liquid. Now, there are three main things that you need to make sure in order for guides to work. One of those being the resolution divisions. Make sure that the resolution divisions is exactly the same across both domains. For this simulation, we're going to set this 296. When we create the smoke simulation later, we want to make sure the resolution divisions is exactly the same or it's not going to work. The other thing down here is the format volume. Make sure unicas is enabled. Open VDB will not work with guides. We're going to switch that right here. The other thing that we're going to change is the cache directory. Since we're working with multiple domains, we want to make sure the directories are different for each domain so they don't override each other. What I'll do is over on the right side, I'm going to click that button, go back a little bit right here, and you're going to want to create two different folders, one for the liquid, and then one for the smoke. You can see I've already done that right here. Once you've done that, click on the liquid folder and then click Accept. We're going to change the type over to modular and then make sure it's resumable is checked just in case we want to stop the bake. For the end frame, I'm going to set this to 150 to match the end frame in my timeline. Let's go back up to the top here and we're going to change a couple of fluid settings. First off, the CFL number, I'm going to go up to four. This will just help speed up the bake time just a little bit. Then for the border collisions, I don't want the fluid to collide with this right wall. I'm going to uncheck the right option so the fluid will just fly outwards. Down here, we're going to turn on fractional obstacles, so the fluid will just pass over this obstacle right here without getting stuck. Then we don't need a mesh since we're not going to see the liquid, so we can go ahead and uncheck that. Now for the rest of the objects, we're going to select our collision, fluid, change the type over to effector. Then for the surface thickness, I'm just going to go up to a value of 0.1. Finally, for the flow object, select it right here. We're going to turn on fluid, change the type over to flow. For the flow type, we're going to choose liquid, and then of course, we're going to switch it to inflow. The other thing I want to do is as the simulation plays, I want it to stop emitting fluid at around frame 65. I'm going to jump over to frame 65, add in a keyframe next to that used flow, jump to the very next frame, frame 66, uncheck this, and then add in another keyframe. For the rest of the simulation, it's not going to emit fluid into our domain. Once we've done that, we're ready to bake this in, save your project and then click on Bake data. Once this is done baking, we're going to create the Smoke simulation and then enable guides. All the bake has finished and we can scroll through here to see what it looks like, and that is looking pretty good. Now for the smoke simulation, let's go ahead and restart the timeline, and what we want to do is we want to separate these domains into different collections. I'm going to box select these three objects, press M, and move them to their own collection, and I'm going to call this liquid. Then I will create that collection. Then what we can do is press Shift D on all of these objects, right click to cancel the movement, and then we'll press M again and move them to their own collection. We're going to call this smoke. Then what we'll do is we'll select the domain in the liquid collection. We're going to name this object liquid domain just so we keep everything organized. Then we'll do the same thing here, which is cube 006. This is going to be the smoke domain. Change the name right here. We'll call it smoke domain just like that. Now with the smoke domain selected, before we free the data, we want to make sure that we change the directory to that other smoke folder. Over any cache settings, I'm going to click that button on the side, go back one and then use the smoke folder right here and then click Accept. Now once we change the folder, we're free to click on free data without affecting the liquid domain. Make sure you've done that, then you can free the data. For the domain type, we're going to switch it over to the gas option, leave the resolutions at 96, and then for the border collisions, I'm going to turn on the bottom right here, so the smoke will actually collide with the bottom of the domain and then go outwards. Now you might think to check all these other boxes here, but I've noticed with some simulations that the smoke goes along the top and it doesn't really look that good. Only checking the bottom will allow the smoke to just pass through the sides without getting stuck. Another thing that you're going to want to leave off is the adaptive domain. This will not work with the guides, so we're going to leave it off. Finally, we're going to open up the guides option here, check this box, and now we have three different settings to go through. The weight option is basically the lag that the guide has. Higher values will result in some smoke being left behind, whereas lower values will allow more smoke to be pulled in because the weight is smaller. Size is the size of your guide and it's the amount that it's going to grab in order to move its velocity, you can see the differences on screen. Velocity factor takes the velocity of the guide and then multiplies it to your object. You can see on screen with higher values, the smoke or liquid is moving, much faster. What we're going to do in this scene is we're going to set the weight a bit lower so it grabs more smoke. We're going to set the size a bit lower as well, two, three, and then the velocity factor, I'm going to go with one, so it doesn't add any velocity. Then, of course, for the guide parent, we're going to want to choose the liquid domain. Once we've done that, we can go ahead and select our flow object, which is this one right here. We're going to change the type from liquid over to smoke. Then another thing that I want to do is turn on initial velocity so the smoke actually shoots downwards. If we go into front view though, I want to make sure that the liquid will actually grab all of the smoke that's around our flow object. In order for that to happen, we're going to just going to drag it slightly below the liquid, just like that and then maybe scale the entire thing down just a tiny bit. Then we're going to turn on initial velocity, set the Z direction to negative one, so the smoke shoots downwards, just like that, and now we should be good to go. Select your smoke domain, come up to the top here, Control S to save your project. Another thing to keep in mind is when working with guides, it will significantly increase the bake time, only enable guides if you really need it. Once you're ready, click on Bake data. All the Bake has finished and here is our results. If we play our animation, you'll see that the smoke is actually flowing with the fluid, which looks pretty interesting. From here, we can go ahead and disable the liquid simulation. We aren't going to need it anymore. Now let's play animation one more time and here's the result. There we go. That is how we use guides as a domain in our simulation. From here, if you wanted to render it out, you can set up a basic material with the principled Shader and then render out an animation. In the next video, we'll be using an effector object as a guide to create this simulation. 16. Effector Guides: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to be taking a look at effector guides in the smoke and fire simulation. Here I've created a basic scene with a couple of different objects. This cube is going to be our domain object. We also have a flow object down here and then there's a curve object here. Now, what I want is for the effector guide to grab the smoke and drag it up along the curve. If you want to follow along with this video, you can find the Blenhle in the resources. We're going to do first is add that new object. I'm going to press Shift A and add in a cylinder. I'm going to hit Alt G to snap the origin to the center, and you want to make sure the origin of the curve and the origin of this new cylinder are in the exact same spot which they are now. Then I'm going to press S, then Shift Z to scale it down a little bit, and then I'm going to scale it upwards, somewhere around there. Now, to have this follow the curve, we need to add in a couple of loop cuts down the middle. I edit mode, I'm going to hit Control R. We'll just add in around 20. Let's go with around actually 50 loop cuts, left click and then right click. Then over in the modifier tab, I'm going to select Add modifier. Underneath deform, we can choose the curve modifier. For the deform axis, let's change it to the Z, and then for the object, it's going to be the spiral. So you can see here once we drag this up, it's going to go along the curve. So now let's create a basic animation of this going along the curve. On a frame one, it's going to be down here. I'm going to hit K and then add a location keyframe. And make sure you press G and Z, and that's going to move it upwards. If you drag it along the X direction or the Y, it's going to not work properly. So when you're moving it, hit G, then Z, and then drag it upwards like this. So we're going to skip all the way to frame 120. We'll press G and Z and drag this all the way up till it's around here or so. Then we'll hit K and add in a location keyframe. Now when we restart and play it, here is the result. Let's drag over both of these keyframes in the timeline, hit T, and choose linear. Now the animation is moving at a constant rate along these different keyframes. Now that we have the objects in the scene, let's create the simulation. I'm going to select the domain first and over in the physics panel, we're going to turn on fluid, set the type two domain. We're going to leave adaptive domain off because again, this does not work with guides, so we need to make sure that is off. We're going to turn on guides right here and then instead of using the velocity source, we're going to switch it over to the effector mode. Now, unlike the domain option here, the format volume for this simulation can be left on open VDB. Open VDB or UNICAs will work for effector guides, but it does not work for domain guides. Keep that in mind when you're working with guides, if you're switching it to domain, you need to make sure you switch the format to UNICAe. But since we're using an effector, we can leave it on open VDB. Next, we're going to switch the type over to modular so we can bake this in. I'm going to turn on is resumable and then for the end frame, let's match the end frame in the timeline, which is 150. What I want for this simulation is for the smoke to be caught and dragged up along that curve. Over in the settings here, I'm going to bring the weight, which is the lag behind the guide. We're going to bring this a bit lower so it's a bit stronger when it catches. For the size, we're going to go down to a value of around four or so. The velocity factor, let's also go down to around one so that it doesn't fly off once it reaches this corner but actually sticks along this curve. Now for the actual guide, we're going to select it, turn on fluid, switch the type to effector, and then for the effector type, we're going to switch it over to guide. Now here we have a couple of different settings to go through. First off, the sampling substeps option here, if our guide is moving very quickly, you may want to turn this value up. Since this animation though is not really moving that fast, you don't really need to turn up the substeps at all. So we're just going to leave it off at a value of zero. This only applies to very fast moving effectors. The surface thickness is the area around our guide. So if I zoom in over here, this is the area around currently with it set to zero. But if we were to drag this up to, let's say, 0.4 or something like that, the area around where the guide catches the smoke is going to be pushed outwards. So probably around four is going to be somewhere around here, I'm guessing. Used effector option here allows you to toggle between using this guide or not using it. This can also be animated to create some interesting effects. There is planar option right here is used for objects that are non manifold, which means it's not a solid mesh. You can think of this as a plane, for example, or if I was to add in another cube or something and delete one side of the face. This is now a non manifold mesh, and that means there's a hole in it and it's not fully sealed. This would be a non manifold mesh and I would need to make sure that I enable is planar if I was using that object as the guide. Below that, we have an option for the velocity factor again. Now this is for the individual guide itself, whereas in the domain counts for the entire simulation, all the guides inside that domain, whereas this velocity factor correlates to its own specific object. Now, below that is the guide mode. Now there are four different options and what this does is it takes the velocity factor in your domain and in your guide and then does the math equation. For example, override will override the domain right here, this velocity factor and then use this one here. Average will take the average of this velocity factor and the one in the domain and then average it out if they are different. Maximum and minimum does the same thing. It will use the maximum velocity factor or it will use the minimum. For this simulation, I'm going to leave it on override and I'm just going to leave it at a value of one. Next we're going to select our flow object, select fluid, change the type over to flow, and then for the flow type, we're going to switch it over to inflow. The other thing I want to do is add more smoke at a faster rate and we can do that with the initial velocity. If I turn this on, we're going to set the source value up a bit to around two so it emits faster into the scene. Now, the other thing I want to do for the simulation is right around here, I wanted to stop emitting smoke. At frame 61, I'm going to add a keyframe to the use flow. Then on the next frame, frame 62, let's uncheck use flow and then add in another keyframe. Now it's no longer going to emit smoke. We're going to do a similar thing with our domain. Over here on the domain settings, let's set the resolution to 64. We're going to set the CFL number to four as well, so it just bakes a little bit faster. Then underneath the dissolve option, let's do that here as well. On frame 60, we're going to uncheck the dissolve at a keyframe. Then on the next frame, we'll turn it on and then add in another keyframe. Then for the time value, let's go up to around let's say 50. With that done, we can go ahead and bake this in and see what it looks like. Now one thing to keep in mind when working with effector guides, the size of your guide really matters. For example, if we go into etymde and scale this down pretty small, this would not catch that much smoke because it's a very skinny cylinder. If we wanted to catch more smoke and drag it further up on the curve, we're going to need to go into etymode and scale this up along the X and Y. It's something like this and this would catch a lot of smoke. Now, this, I think is probably a bit too big, so I might scale it down slightly, something like that, and this will give us a nice simulation. So let's go ahead and test this out now. I'm going to select the My domain down here in the guides panel, make sure you save your project, and then click on Bake Guides. Now this will go through the process of baking the guides, and once this is done, we can bake in the actual smoke simulation. Now that the guides have finished, we're going to scroll up here and then click on Bake data in this option here, and now it's going to bake in the entire simulation. All right, the simulation from here, I would experiment with different guide settings and find out what looks good. You can have an object spinning in a circle to create a really cool portal effect with the smoke. You can also have two different effectors collide into each other, allowing the smoke to collide and mix together with different colors. There's a lot of interesting things that you could probably do with effector guides if you just experiment a little bit. In the next video, we're going to take a look at collections. 17. Collections: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to be taking a look at the collections tab in the domain settings. Here is where you can limit which collections the domain will use for the flow objects or for the effector objects. This can be very useful if you have multiple domains in your scene and you have the flow objects that are in some domains and some in others, you can select which ones that you want it to effect right here. Example, we have nothing selected here. Whatever flow objects are in the scene, if it's inside the domain, it will actually emit smoke. However, if we were to select the flow object on the right, which is called in flow two, let's press M and move it to a new collection. We'll create a new one just like that. Now if we select our domain object, we're going to come down here to the flow and we're going to select collection two. You can see now if we restart the simulation, we might need to change a setting to refresh it. You can see the flow object on the left now is no longer emitting smoke because we limited it to the collection two, which this flow object is not in. Now when we play the animation, you can see it is working properly. This also works for effector objects as well. Let's go ahead and select our inflow one. We're just going to change it over to an effector object. We'll drag it up, place it right here right in the middle of our scene, maybe scale it out a little bit. Then we got to make sure that we apply the scale to it. Let's select our domain and then we're going to limit the effectors to collection one. If we select it there, we'll go ahead and restart the simulation, maybe change a setting to refresh it, and then we'll play the animation. You can see it is working and now it's colliding with that object. Again, this is an easy way to limit which flow objects that you want to use in your domain and this can be useful if you have multiple domains in your scene. 18. Cache & Bake: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to be taking a look at the cache panel in the domain settings. Here is where you can bake in the simulation, set the start and end frame, and then export it a certain format, and I'll be covering each of those in this video. First, I want to cover the folder of where the cache is located. Right now, I have not saved this blender file, so the cache right here is set in a temporary folder. You can see here if I select it, local and TEM. This means that if you were to close this blender file and open it back up later, all of the simulation data will be deleted because it's a Temp folder. What you need to do to prevent that is to select the button on the right side, which is the folder icon. Navigate to a new folder and then save it there. You can do this by selecting a folder. I'll just go here caches, I'll create a new folder. I'll call it cache example. Now I can select this folder and then click except on the bottom right. Now when we bake this in, the simulation data will be saved. Other thing to note though is if you save your blender file before you select the domain here, for example, if I were to press Control S, I'll just call it cache example dot blend. We'll save that blender file. Now I'm going to delete this, add an A fluid, switch the type over to domain. Now we can see here if we click on this folder icon, it's going to save it wherever that blend file is located, which is in this folder. That's one thing to keep in mind is if you save your blender file before you add an A domain object, the cache will be saved in that folder. Moving on, we have the start and end frame. This is pretty easy to understand. Here you can set when you want the simulation to start and then when you want it to end. The offset right here is currently grade out and that's because we have the type set to replay. Before we talk about the offset, let's talk about the different types right here. The default one is set to replay and now if we restart and play the animation, you can see the simulation is playing. That is what replay is. It allows you to see the animation and simulation play in the viewport without having to bake it in. If we want to bake it in, we're going to want to switch over to modular or all. Modular will allow us to bake individual modules, as you can see here. We first have to bake in the initial domain settings and then if we wanted to add noise, we can add that in here and then we would also have to bake in the noise right here. You're going to notice though a little warning right here that is non resumable cache enable resumable options first. This means that if you have noise enabled, you're not going to be able to bake it in unless I resumable is checked with the modular option on. Is resumable allows you to pause the bake and then resume it at a later point. This is actually very useful. If you're baking at a very high resolution, you can stop the bake maybe a quarter of the way in, see what it looks like, and if you need to change something without having to wait the entire bake. Let's go ahead and test this out. I'm going to bake the data. I'm going to pause it right about there. Then to actually see this, I'm going to uncheck noise. Now if we play the animation, we can see what it looks like. It's going to stop wherever we stop the bake and if we like what we see, we can go ahead and click Rezoom. Now it'll finish out the simulation baking, which is very useful, like I said, for baking high resolution scenes. If you want to change something, what you're going to want to do is click on free and that's going to free the data and now you can change the settings how you like. Moving on from there, the other type that we have here is and what this will do, like the names suggest, it's going to bake everything all at once. Now if we wanted to bake in the noise, if we wanted guides, we can go ahead and check that box. We can bake everything all at once with one single click. Again, you have the is resumable option right here. I'm going to go back over to modular and now let's talk about the offset option. What this allows us to do is change when the simulation starts. For example, let's say I want to start it at around 15 frames. I'm going to type in 15 there. I'm going to click on Bake data. Keep in mind, this is still going to bake from frame one to whenever the frame end value is, and right now it's set to 250. What the offset does is it just moves over the simulation to frame 15 and that's when it's actually going to start playing. Now if I play the animation, you can see right when it hits 15, it's going to play the simulation. Moving on from there, we have two different format options, Open VDB and UICASH. UICASH is Blenders way of simulating fluid and smoke and fire and all of that, then Open VDB is another format which was actually developed by Dreamworks. There's an entire other video dedicated to open VDBs. But basically, what this allows you to do is export the files to any other program that also supports open VDBs. This also means that you can export open VDBs from other programs and then import them into blender. Again, there's an entire video dedicated to open VDBs later in this course. We open up the Advanced tab, there are two more options to go through. The compression volumes allows you to choose how the files will be compressed. There are three different options, zip, Blosk and none. None, of course, means no compression, so the files are going to be very large. Blosk is the other one and this is the default one. Normally, I just leave it at the default one. I've never really changed this option. Zip is another way to compress the file. It's effective, but you can see it has a slow compression speed. Precision volumes right here, half and full, half will write the files as half and it will save on data, or if you want the full high quality, you can switch it to full. But again, this is going to be a much bigger size than half would be. These two values only work with the open VDB format. If we were to switch it over to Unicast, you're not going to have any of those options here because again, this is just for blenders own file formatting. Let's go ahead and test out a BC. I'm going to switch this over to open VDB. Once again, we're going to leave the precision on half. I'm going to set the end frame to 100 and then the offset will go with zero. I'm going to click on this folder. I'm going to go back to where we added that initial cast, which is here, the cache example. Click except, and now we can go ahead and bake the data. Once the BC has done, you can open up your folder and here is where we saved it. If we open up this, we can open up the data and now we can see all of the VDB files right here. Again, we're going to have a video covering open VDBs later in this course. But there we go. That is the cache panel in blender. 19. Field Weights: Moving on from the cast, we're going to look at the field weight options in the domain settings. Here is where you can set how much force fields or gravity will affect your fire or smoke in your domain. For example, we have a basic scene right here with the smoke and fire moving upwards as you can see there. If we wanted to, we could turn off gravity. We can go with a value of zero and now the smoke and fire is not going to move as you can see there. Can also set this to a negative value. Let's go with negative one, for example, and now the fire will actually go downwards. Keep in mind, this gravity value is only a percentage. It's not going to change the direction of the gravity or how much gravity there is in the scene. If you wanted to change that, you're going to want to go up here to where the gravity option is. If this is grade out, you need to go over to the scene panel and change it here in the gravity options, which we covered earlier in this course. The other options like all force, vortex, magnetic, all of these are just percentages of how much force fields will affect your scene. I'll do one more demonstration if we add in a force field, a wind force field, let's rotate this along the Y by 90 degrees and then maybe bring the strength up to around five. If we restart the animation now and play, you can see force, the wind is pushing the fire in that direction. However, if we come back here, we can set the wind, which is this. Again, this is a percentage. If we go all the way to around 0.5, for example, only half of the strength of this force field will affect the simulation. The strength is now technically 2.5. If we select our domain, restart, change a setting to refresh it. Now we'll play it and you can see that is working. Finally, the effector collection will allow you to limit which collection actually has an effect on domains. Again, this is useful. It's very similar to the collections up here. If you have multiple force fields in your scene, some are affecting domains or particle systems, all of that, you can choose which effector collection will affect this domain. 20. Viewport Display: We are almost done with the domain settings. There are two more panels to go through, and that first one is going to be the viewport display. What this does is it allows you to change what the viewport looks like in your simulation. This can give you accurate results for different attributes. You can see different data associated with the fire simulation, and we're going to go through that right now. When we open up this panel, there are three options here at the very top thickness, interpolation and size per voxel. The thickness obviously is the thickness of the density of the smoke. Let's say, for example, we go up to a value of ten, you're going to see the smoke is a lot more dense. Keep in mind that this is only for the viewport. This does not affect how the actual render will appear. If you wanted to change that, you're going to have to go into the render settings or change the material for the domain object. Going to set the thickness back down to one now for the interpolation, this is the way that the voxels are meshed together in the viewport. There are three different options. Linear and cubic are very similar, but closeness actually gives you a pixel look as you can see there. Now if we turn up the thickness, this can give us some really interesting results. If we go a value of 50, we now have a pixel simulation just like that. As for the slice per voxl, we can see this as if we zoom in here, this is basically how many slices are in the viewport. We can see here if I go much lower to 0.1, for example, you're going to see a lot of pixelation in the fire simulation just like that. If I move my viewport, you can see it even more. This is basically just the quality of it. We're going to go much higher though back up to five. Underneath that, we have the slice option and this allows you to slice your simulation into a two D view as you can see there. For the axis, auto means that it's going to automatically change based on your view. As you can see here, I'm in the front view, and now I'm in the side view and it automatically rotates when I move my camera in that direction. As for the position, this controls where on that two D plane, this is going to slice, and then you can also change to a certain axis if you wanted to, like X, for example, and now it's locked to the X axis. The grid display allows you to see certain attributes of your smoke and fire simulation. With it turned on, we can change the field from density to whatever we like fuel, heat, we can even go with red, green, blue, the forces, the velocity. All of these different attributes are available for you to view. If we select the flame, we can only see now what the flame looks like. Then if we wanted to change the color, we can change the color ramp right here. Maybe we wanted to go with a blue color or a green, something like that. Now we get this look in the viewport. Underneath that, we have the vector display and what this allows you to do is visualize the actual vectors and forces being applied to your smoke. You can see everything turned very pink, but we can change that by changing the scale option. Let's go with a value of 0.1, for example, you can see all of the needles now have become very small and all of this data is basically just the forces being applied to the flame and the smoke. Magnitude option allows you to change the size of all of these different needles based on how much force is being applied. You can see with it off, all of the needles are exactly the same size, and then with it on, some of them are bigger, and then over here, some of them are smaller. If you don't like those needles, you can change them to streamlines, just a different way of viewing all of that different information. Now that we've covered all of the different settings for our viewpoint display, let's actually create something with this. Over on the right side, I'm going to set the thickness a little bit higher. Let's go with a value of five. For the interpolation, I'm going to go with closest, so we get this grid pattern. Then for the slice per voxil, let's go up slightly to ten, just to give us a little bit more quality in that flame. That's looking pretty good. Next, I'm going to turn on a slice, so we actually get this tot effect. I'm going to open up the slice tab and then for the axis, let's go with Y. Now when we're in the front view by hitting one, we can press Z and tag overlays. We now have this pixelated effect for our fire, which actually looks pretty interesting. From here, if you like how this looks, what you can actually do is come up to view and then click on Viewport Render Animation. This is going to actually render out an animation of wherever you are looking in the viewport. We're actually going to be covering that specific topic in a later video in the next section. But there we go. That is how the viewport display works in Blender. Then one more time, this only affects the viewport. This does not affect the overall render when you actually render out a proper animation or image. 21. Velocity Scale: We have one more option to go through in the domain settings, and that is the velocity scale in the render section right here at the very bottom. This deals with motion blur with your simulation. How it works is we first need to enable motion blur for our scene. To do that, we can go over to the render panel right here, make sure that we're using the cycles render engine because motion blur with volumes does not work in EV. Make sure you're using cycles, and then you can come down here to the motion blur and check this box right here. If we open up this panel, this shutter value controls the motion blur for the entire scene. This is for the entire scene, whereas the velocity scale is only for the fire simulation. If we want less motion blur in the fire, we can turn this velocity scale down. If we want more, we can turn it up. On screen, you can see the different values with different shutters amount. You can see with no motion blur and then with a shutter value of 0.4 with a velocity scale of 0.2, and you can see those different values, and then on the far right, we have a shutter value of 0.5 with a velocity scale of 0.5. You can see there it's very, very blurry. There's a lot of motion blur going on. If I was to leave this velocity scale at a value of one with the shutter amount at a value of 0.5, there's going to be a lot of motion blur. What I recommend for a normal amount of motion blur in the scene is to go down to a round of value of 0.2 or even 0.1. That will give you a nice amount of motion blur in the scene, but the shutter amount, you can play around with this depending on how much you want for the rest of the objects in your scene. One more thing to note about the motion blur is that this is going to drastically increase the render time for your simulation, especially if you have volume smoke in your scene. With some of the comparisons that I've done, it almost doubles the amount of reno time and sometimes triples it depending on if you have smoke in your scene or not. So while it does look really good, having that motion blur in the fire, use it only if you really need to or if you have a lot of time to spare with rendering. But there we go. That is how the velocity scale works in the domain settings, and that is it. We've covered every single setting over here in the domain, and now in the next section, we're going to be covering flow objects and all sorts of cool and interesting things with the fire simulation. 22. Flow Objects P1: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to be covering flow objects in the fire and smoke simulation in Blender, how they work, all of their settings, and what you can do with them. So here we are in this basic scene. I have a domain setup right here with all of the default settings, and then we have a object inside of our domain. This is going to be our flow object for the scene. So how we add in a flow object is first, you need to have it selected. Then over in the physics panel, select fluid. For the type, you can use flow. Now, we've covered flow objects a lot throughout this course, but in this video and the next video, we're going to be covering all of these different settings and what they do. So we're going to start out right at the top here with the flow type. If we select it, there are four different options smoke, fire plus smoke, fire, and liquid. Of course, liquid is for the fluid part of the Mantaflow simulation. We're not going to be talking about that in this video. We're just going to be focusing on the first three options. Now, smoke obviously is just the basic smoke simulation. With it selected, if we play our animation, we can see what this does. You can see a puff of smoke has risen into our domain. Now for the other options, smoke plus fire, that's going to combine a fire simulation plus a smoke simulation. Then underneath that, we also have the fire option. You take a look at this example on screen right now, you can see the differences between those three different options. The fire option will have a little bit of smoke being emitted into the scene, but if you actually want a full on smoke simulation and fire, you're going to want to use the fire plus smoke. For campfires or different simulations like that, I would probably stick with just the fire simulation. But for an explosion, for example, I would stick with the fire plus smoke because with explosions, you're going to want a lot more smoke in the simulation rather than just a little bit with the fire simulation. Below the flow type, we have the flow behavior. There are three different options inflow, outflow and geometry. Inflow will constantly add fluid into your scene or in this case, smoke. You can see here instead of that puff of smoke, it's constantly adding smoke into our simulation. You can see the differences on screen again with the inflow outflow and geometry. Geometry is just the overall shape of that initial flow object, and that's going to be the smoke or the liquid that's emitted into the scene. Outflow will delete smoke. You can see on the right side, it's deleting everything that it touches. Below that, we have the sample substeps. Now, this is an important setting here. If you have a very fast moving inflow, you're going to want to turn this value up. If you don't do this, you might get puffs of smoke throughout the animation, as you can see on screen. This is a very fast moving flow object and the left side is leaving different gaps between the different frames. In this case, I would want to turn that sample substeps up to get that nice smooth streak of smoke. Now below the sample substeps, we have the option for the smoke color. This deals with the individual flow objects in your scene. This allows for different colors of smoke based on what you said here. For example, let's select the flow object on the right. Let's set it over to a blue color. And then for the flow object on the left, let's set it over to a reddish color. Now when we select our domain, let's change a setting to refresh it. And now when we play the animation, you can see we have different values of smoke. Now, this can be very useful if you want to mix different colors of smoke together using a vortex force field, for example, or different things like that. You can get some really interesting animation. One thing to keep in mind though is if we go into the rendered view, let's go ahead and create a basic material for our domain here. I'm going to delete this material for our domain, create a new one, and then for the surface, I'm going to remove it and for the volume right here, we're going to want to switch it over to the principled volume shader. Now we're going to be able to see our smoke in our scene. If we restart though and play it, you're going to notice both of the smokes are using the exact same color. We no longer have this blue and red in the viewport. It only is using the white color. This is because over in the settings here, it's using this color for the smoke. I can change it here and we can see the different colors, but we don't see the individual colors here. What we need to do is in this color attribute is just type in the word color, all lowercase, and then enter, and now we're going to be able to see those different colors in our simulation. One thing to keep in mind is it's going to combine this color here with the color attribute. For example, if I switch this to a green color, it's going to basically override what we set here and use a green color. So if you're using the colors in the flow objects, you're going to want to make sure that this is all the way at white. The value is at one, and now you get the colors that you want. Below the smoke color, we have a checkbox for absolute density. This is enabled, the emitter will only produce smoke if there is room for it in the domain. If the domain is completely full of smoke, it's no longer going to emit smoke into the simulation unless there is room for it. With it unchecked, this will constantly add smoke or fluid into the domain, even if it's already completely full. Usually, it's a good option to just leave this on. Initial temperature deals with the speed at which the smoke is emitted. If I go up to a value of, let's say five, for example, the smoke will emit very quickly. Now, this is correlated with the heat and buoyancy density over here in the domain settings. We talked about this early on in this course with the initial temperature set at a negative value instead of a positive one, and then the domain settings here, both of these are set to a positive number. This means that a negative times a positive, the smoke will sink. You can see here, the smoke is starting to sink. Whereas if the Buoyancy density, these values are set to a negative like negative one, for example, now they're both negative, so this means the smoke will rise into the domain. Again, this is the speed of it. Higher values will result in faster moving smoke and lower values will result in slower moving smoke. The density underneath here is the density of the smoke. It's pretty easy to understand. Lower values will mean that it'll emit smoke at a lower density and higher values will make the smoke look way more thick and dense. Before we talk about the vertex group, let's switch this over to the fire option. Now when we switch it over, there's another value here called fuel. Now, the fuel is basically the flame rate. Higher values will result in taller, more chaotic flames. You want to be careful, though, because if you go too high with this value, sometimes the flow object will go way too crazy and then your simulation will look very strange. I recommend sticking with a value 1-3, but you probably don't really want to go any higher than a value of three. For the last setting that we're going to talk about in this video is the vertex group. Here you can enable a Vertex group to determine where you want the fire or smoke to appear on your flow object. How this works is you first need to create a new group. Now, you can do this very easily by jumping over to the object data panel and you can create a new group by hitting this plus sign. You can then name the group if you have multiple groups in your scene. You can just call this one fire, for example. Now, in order to get this to work, we can go into Edit mode, and then we can select different parts of our object here that we want to emit smoke. So let's say I hit Alt A to D select, I can go into the face select mode, and then with circle select by hitting C, I can just drag where I want the fire to emit. So I think that looks pretty good. From here, I can click Assign over on this panel, and it's going to assign that group with a weight of one. The weight option is basically the percentage. With a set to 100%, that means 100% of the fire will be in that area that I just selected. Let's say, for example, I'm going to come over here, I'm going to hit C for Circle Select, and I'll just drag this corner. Now I'm going to set the weight a bit lower. Let's go with a value of around 0.5. We'll click Assign here. Only 50% of the weight is going to be applied to this area. To see this a bit more, we can also come up here and switch it over to the weight paint and now we can see the different values. Wherever there is red, that means it's at 100% value. Where it's green, you can see this is around 50%. You can also paint here as well if you just select and paint. So with this vertex group selected, let's go back into object mode and then assign it over in the physics panel. So here underneath Vertex group, you can select the fire. When we restart the animation and play it, we can see it's only emitting fire right where we painted that vertex group. Now you can see over here where it's at 50%, the flames are not as tall. That's because it has a lower percentage, so they're going to be much smaller flames. Vertex groups in blender are very versatile and there's a lot of really interesting simulations that you can do when you apply them to the smoke and fire. For example, with a vertex group, you can create a trail of fire or you can have a burning up effect. You can use dynamic paint. There's a lot of really interesting things that you can do with it, and I recommend learning how to use vertex groups to your advantage. In the next video, we're going to be looking at all of the other settings for our flow object. 23. Flow Objects P2: This video, we're going to cover the rest of the settings for our flow objects in the fire and smoke simulation. Starting out with the flow source, there are two different options here, mesh and particle system. Mesh will emit smoke from the mesh of the object, whereas particle system will emit smoke from a particle system, which we'll cover in just a second. Before we do that, I want to cover these three settings. Is plane R we mentioned when we covered the guides. Basically, what this does is it will enable objects like a plane or an object that is not fully closed to emit smoke. For example, I'll just go through this one more time. If you add in a cube, then we delete one side of this. Now this is a non closed mesh. It's a non manifold mesh. This means that you need to make sure that I plan R is checked for this to work properly. Below that, we have surface emission and volume emission. For this, I created a basic simulation. Let's go into front view. The one on the left here has a surface emission at one, the one in the middle has a surface emission at two. When we restart, you're going to see the differences between them. One is a lot closer to the surface of the mesh, whereas two, you can see here it's further out from it. The higher you set the surface emission, the further out it'll be. Below the surface emission is the volume emission and this will allow smoke to actually be emitted from inside the mesh. You can see here this object has a surface emission at zero but a volume emission at one. That means all of the smoke that is inside here will be emitted from the inside of the mesh. Whereas the one here does not have any smoke being emitted from the inside, it's only from the outside. Let's go into front view and play this animation and you can see exactly what this looks like. To demonstrate the particle system, let's create a quick particle system with this flow object. With it selected over in the particle system tab, I'm going to create a new one. I'm going to leave the type on emitter. Here will not work for this, so make sure the type is set to emitter. Underneath the field weights, I'm going to turn off gravity and then in the velocity here, I'm going to set the normal amount to two and then I'm also going to bring up the randomness up to a value of one. The lifetime, let's go with around 25. It's only going to last for 25 frames right when the particle gets emitted. To actually see this, we need to open up the viewport display, change the display from rendered over two point. So now what happens is when we play this, we can see all of the particles being emitted. What we need to do now is jump over to the physics tab underneath the flow source. We need to change it over to particle system. Then for the option here, you can select which particle system. Now since we only have one on this object, we can select it right there. Now when we restart and play it, we can see all of the particles being emitted just like that and they're all emitting smoke into the scene. From here, you can set the size, the amount of area around each particle, if you wanted more or less smoke. For example, if I go all the way up to three, we're going to have a lot more smoke for each single particle. Using a particle system for the smoke or fire is very useful for creating explosions, and that's what we're going to be using when we create that big explosion later in this course. The next couple of settings that we're going to go over is the initial velocity. What this does is it allows the movement of the flow object to affect the outcome of the smoke. For example, with it on with all of the default settings, the one on the top here does not have initial velocity, but the one on the bottom does. Let's go ahead and play the animation and see what happens. You can see here. Let's go into front view. I'll show that one more time. One on the top here is not having any movement affect the smoke here. But the one on the bottom is, you can see it's pushing all of it because it's taking the velocity of the flow object in mind when the smoke gets emitted. You can see here it flies and hits the edge of this domain. For the settings, the source value is basically the multiplication of that velocity. Let's say we go all the way up to four, for example, you're going to see here the smoke is being pushed out way further because we set that source up higher. It takes the velocity of our flow object and basically multiplies it by four. Whereas if we go lower like 0.5, for example, it's going to have less of an effect and the smoke is not going to move as much. Below the source, there is an option for the normal velocity. This takes the normals of your object and then adds velocity to the smoke in that direction. To actually see where the normals are pointing on our object, we can go into edit mode. Then up here on the top here, we can turn on the vertices and then bring up the size amount. This is the direction of the normals for each of the vertices. Now keep in mind, it's not going to emit from the faces, it's going to emit from the vertices. You're going to see here, it's going to go out in this angle. So now once we're out of Eta mode, the normal amount is set to 50. Let's go ahead and play this and you can see all the smoke is being emitted in that direction of the normals for each of the vertices. Finally, the last couple of settings are the initial velocities on the different axes. Here you can customize if you want the smoke to be emitted in the X direction, Y direction, or Z, and you can even go with negative values. Let's say, for example, I go with a value of negative five for the Z axis. When we play the animation, it's going to initially shoot out the smoke in the negative Z direction and then it'll start to float up. Now again, the higher you set this two, the faster it'll be. Let's go with negative 25. Restart and play it, and here is the result. You can see the smoke gets pushed out really quickly and then it starts to go back up once the initial velocity has worn out. Again, this works for all of the different axes here and you can choose which ones that you want to use. The last couple of settings that we're going to go through is the texture panel here. This allows you to add in a texture on your flow object to determine where the fire or smoke will be emitted into your domain. Now, how this works is you first need to enable it with that checkbox. Then if we select the texture, you're not going to see anything here until you create a new texture over here in the texture panel. We're going to create a new texture by clicking that new button, and then from here, you can add in your own image if you wanted to use an image to control this, or you can use one of the procedural options here that blender has. We're going to select clouds for this demonstration and now we can see what our texture is going to look like. Where the black values are, that is where fire will not be emitted and where the white values are, there will be fire. Here in the cloud settings, we can change a bunch of different options to customize how our texture is going to look. You can also change the size of this. Let's say, for example, we go down 2.1, we can see we have much smaller texture. Then over here in the colors, we can bring up the contrast to have better definition between the white and black values. You can also turn on the color ramp to customize this even more if you wanted to drag these values this way. Now you can really see how this works. Here, what you're going to want to do is jump back over to the physics panel. It should automatically have that texture applied. Then if we play the animation, you can see this effect. This is what our current texture looks like. You can see the black spots here and that's creating a really nice look. At this point, we can change the size of it if you wanted it to be smaller or bigger. When we restart, you can see this is the effect now. The texture is a bit smaller, so we have more variation. Also animate these two values. For example, with this offset, I can on frame one, add a keyframe to that offset, we'll jump to frame 100, set the offset up to, let's say, 0.5, then add in other keyframe. With these keyframes, we're going to want to box select them, hit T, and make sure the interpolation is linear. The texture will move at a constant rate. Now, when we restart and play this, the texture is going to move around causing our fire to look way more natural and random. And you can see this is the effect. Now, this is a very low resolution simulation, so you're not going to get that good of detail. But if you were to crank up the resolution, bake this out, and render it, this is going to look so much better than having no texture. We're going to cover this in a bit more detail when we actually create the realistic fire simulation. There we go. We've now covered flow objects completely. In the next video, we're going to take a look at collisions. 24. Collision Objects: Over one. In this video, we're going to talk about collisions in the fire and smoke simulation in blender. To add a collision object, we first need a mesh, and I'm going to just duplicate this flow object, we'll drag it up, scale it along the X axis, so it's a bit bigger, and then I need to make sure I press Control A and apply the scale, so these numbers go back to one. Then we're going to come over here. We'll just delete this so I can show you exactly the process. We're going to click on fluid, change the type over to effector, and then here we're going to leave the type on collision. Now, we do have guides here, but we talked about that in a previous video, so we're going to leave it on collision. Here we have a couple of different settings that are probably similar to other settings that we've covered. These sampling substeps, if you have a fast moving collision, you're going to want to turn this value up. Since our object here is static, we can leave it at a value of zero. The surface thickness is the area around the collision, so the higher you set this two, the further away the collision will be from the surface of the mesh. The use vector option here is just the toggle between using the collision and not using it, and this value can also be animated. Is planar, we talked about that in the last video. Let's say, for example, we delete this space. This is a non closed mesh. We're going to want to make sure is planar is checked here. I'm just going to control Z that a couple times. Since this is a closed mesh, I'm just going to leave that value off. Let's go ahead and test this out. Here we have a basic smoke simulation with this object emitting smoke into the scene. We're going to select our domain and click on Bake. Now when we bake in a simulation with a collision, this will take up a little bit more processing power, so the bake is going to take a little bit longer. Keep that in mind, only use collisions if you really have to. The bake has finished, and now when we play the animation, we should be able to see what this looks like. You can see there, it collides with it and then goes along the edges and it looks pretty neat. Now one thing to keep in mind when working with collision objects, for example, this plane here is a non planar mesh. That means for this to work properly, we need to turn on is planR. To test this out, you can see here when we play the animation, the smoke passes right through it. But now when we enable is planR, we can go ahead and play this now and see what happens. We can see it now collides with the edge of the plane because we enabled that option here. Another problem that you might run into when working with collisions, you can see here we have a simulation with this cube that's extended out. This should work properly because it is a closed mesh, there's nothing wrong with it. But when we play the animation, you're going to see it doesn't work. The smoke passes right through our collision. Now the reason this is happening is because the normals on our object are currently inverted. If we go into Eta Mode, come up to this menu and turn on the normals and drag this up a bit. We can see the normals are pointed on the inside of the mesh. This is not what we want. We want the normals to be pointing on the outside for this to work properly. To fix this, all we have to do is press A to select everything, press Shift N to recalculate those normals, and now you're going to see they're pointed in the correct direction. Let's go ahead and select our domain, refresh a setting. Now when we play this, you're going to see this works properly and it is colliding with our object. Here's another scenario that you might run into when working with collisions. Here we have a collision object and then inside that collision, we have a flow object. On our collision, we have the default values. Let's go ahead and play this and see what happens. You're going to see the smoke passes right through. Now, there are a couple of reasons for this. First off, just like the previous example, the normals are currently messed up. If an object is inside another object, we need to make sure blender thinks the collision object is empty. Right now, when we go into Edit mode, the normals are pointed in the outwards direction. This means that Blender thinks this object is a completely solid mesh. Order to fix this, we need to press Control shift and N to recalculate the normals or invert them so that the normals are pointed towards the inside of our mesh. Now we'll restart and play it and it still doesn't work. You might think now that we need to enable is plane R or maybe we need to turn up the surface thickness to around 0.2. But you're going to notice when we try and play the animation, nothing's working. It's not simulating, even when we try and restart it. It just doesn't really work at all. Now, one thing I've noticed when working with objects that are inside other objects and trying to collide with them, it can behave a bit strange. Now, one solution I found is to create a hole on your collision object. Now we can do this probably on the bottom here so it doesn't really affect it. In Edit mode, we can select this vertex X, and delete it. Having that hole on the bottom here will allow blender to actually treat this a bit better and calculate it a bit more accurately. Now one thing to keep in mind with this hole, you want to make sure the size of it is slightly bigger than the voxel size. You can see here when I bring up the resolution, the voxel size becomes smaller. So here we would be able to go into Edit mode and make this hole a bit smaller but not smaller than this voxel size. So keep that in mind when you create the hole for yourself to keep it just a little bit bigger than that vaxle size. If we restart and it's still not working, as you can see here, you may need to make the hole a bit bigger or the resolution a bit higher. So maybe we'll try going up to 64. Now when we restart and play this, we can see it's now simulating. And if we come over here and look at It does collide with the surface of the mess. So keep that in mind when working with these collisions, the hole on the bottom needs to be bigger than the voxel size. So that was the problem with this simulation. And now you can see it is working properly. So to recap, you need to create a hole on your collision. You need to make sure the hole is bigger than the vaxl size. You need to make sure is planar is checked. And if you wanted some surface thickness, you can turn that value up, but it's not necessary. But there we go. That is how collisions work in manta flow. 25. Creating Open VDBs: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to take a look at open VDBs what they are and how to use them in Blender. If you didn't know, open VDBs is a file format that stands for open VauxL database or open volumetric database. It's basically a file type that stores information like smoke and fire and everything volumetric. There are many different programs that support open VDBs. Some of the common ones include Houdini, Embrigen and of course, Blender. Means that you can create a simulation in one of those other programs that are specifically designed for simulations like Houdini, export it as a Open VDB file format, and then you can import it into Blender and then render it out. You can also here in Blender export the simulation as an Open VDB, as you can see down here in the format volumes. What we're going to do in this video is we're going to bake this simulation out. You can find this blend file in the resources if you want to follow along, and then we're going to import it into another scene. I'll show you how that works, all the different settings, and then we'll render out an animation. Right here in Blender, I've created a simulation where some particles explode just like this. Now, what we need to do before we bake this out, there's a couple of things that you want to make sure. First off, the adaptive domain is turned off. If this is on, you're going to get some weird scaling issues when you try to import it into another scene. Make sure the adaptive domain right here is left off. Secondly, down here on the cache setting, you want to make sure you set a directory of where you want all of your files, your open VDB files to go to. So make sure you have a custom directory right here. And then finally, for the format volume, of course, make sure it's set to open VDB. Once you've done that, you're good to go and you can bake your simulation out. Again, you can find this blend file in the resources if you want to follow along. So once you've done all that, you've set a new directory. You can go ahead and save your project and then click on Bake All. Once the simulation has finished baking, we're going to jump into a new blender scene and import all of those open VDVs into blender. So here we are in a brand new scene, and we're going to first delete the default cube, and then we're going to import that OpenVDB in. To do this, you can press Shift A, go over to the volume, and then select Import Open VDB. Navigate to where your cache is mine is in this folder. You're going to want to select the data. And then right here, we can see all of our open VDB files. What you're then going to want to do is come up to the top here and make sure you're sorting by the name and not modified date. Modified date will set the last frame, which is 100 and our simulation here at the top. So it's going to play backwards. We want to make sure it's set sort by name, and then what you can do is press A to select everything and then go import Open VDB. Now, if we play our simulation, we can see it in our scene just like that. That's looking pretty good. Let's position this over here in the middle of our scene, drag it forward a little bit. Now if we jump over to the volumetric tab, there are a lot of settings to go through. At the top here, we have all of the different attributes that our simulation has. For example, density, emission, flags, flame, which is the flame data, we can see here. Below that is the fuel, all of these different attributes we can then take into our material later. I'm going to go back up to the top and select density so we can see everything else. Below this, we have the directory of where our files is being taken from. We have a sequence option here. If you wanted to use a still frame of your explosion, you could import that in and then uncheck sequence, so you have a still frame. Have the number of frames in the simulation, the start frame and the offset. Then underneath here, if you wanted it to loop, you could select repeat, for example, and now once it gets past 100, it'll just repeat itself right there. I'm just going to leave it on clip. Below that, we have a couple of options to change how the viewport looks. If we select this option and switch it over to points, for example, and then we go into the wireframe, we can see the individual points on our simulation. Now, the detail amount is set to course, but if we go over to the fine option, we're going to get a lot more points in the simulation. We also have an option for the density and this affects the solid view. We can see here if I drag up the density, the smoke is going to become a lot more dense in the viewport. I'm just going to leave it on a value of one. The interpolation is basically the detail in your viewport. With it set to linear, you're going to get perfectly fine results. Cubic is the highest quality, but it's going to be significantly slower. If I select it, you can see my viewport has slown down just a little bit. It's not as smooth as it was before, so I'm just going to leave it on linear. Then we have the slice, and this is exactly the same as the Viewport display slice, which we talked about in a previous video. We can choose which access we want to slice our simulation and the position of it, and you can slide it back and forth. The render tab here only has two options, but this is because we are in EV. If we gum over to the render engine and switch it over to cycles, I'm going to use my GPU. We're going to get a lot more options for the render tab. The step size here is the quality of the simulation when it's rendered. With it set to zero, it's going to automatically calculate how many steps it needs per frame in order to get good results. For the most part, you can just leave it on zero and you'll be perfectly fine. The clipping option here will delete smoke anytime it's below this density threshold for this clipping amount. For example, let's go ahead and create a new material by selecting the material tab, clicking on new. Now if we press Z and go into the rendered view, we'll come down here and bring up the clipping amount. You can see here it's starting to clip out some of that smoke that is not as dense. I recommend leaving this at a value of 0.001, or you can even go fully to zero. The precision volume here is basically the precision of the render and how good the very fine detail on your smoke will look. I found hardly any differences between all three of them. I actually found that the full option saved on render time by just a couple of seconds. For that reason, we're going to switch it over to full. Of the velocity options here correlate with the motion blur for the simulation. If you remember in the second section where we talked about the motion blur and the render scale with the velocity scale, all of these values here is the exact same thing. You have the velocity scale value here, which you can change in order to choose how much motion blur you want in your simulation. Now that we've talked about all of the different settings, let's create some lighting, create a material, and then render this out. So, first off, for the lighting, I'm going to use an HDR. And if you want to use the same one I'm using, you can find it over on Polyhaven. It's the dry field one. We're going to switch it over to environment Texture, click Open, and the one that I'm using is this dry field four K. Go ahead and open that in. Now if we press Z and go into the render view, we should be able to see what this looks like. I'm going to jump over to the render tab down here in the film. I'm going to turn on transparency so we don't see that background. Now for the material, we're going to come up to the top here, split this view, and switch it over to the shader editor. The density value here controls the density of the smoke. Let's go up to a value of five, so we get some more dense smoke. And then for the color, we'll drag it a little bit darker so we get more of a dark grayish color. To actually bring all of that emission into our simulation, what we need to do is press Shift A, go over to input, and then add in an attribute node. Over here in the volumetric tab, we can choose whichever attribute that we want. It can be flame, it can be fuel, temperature, any of these, we can plug into this attribute node and then we can plug it into our principal volume. For example, let's say I want to take the temperature, all I would have to do is type in the word temperature right here. Then we can take the factor, plug this into the emission strength, and now we're getting the temperature attribute, controlling all of the emission. Then to control this a bit better, we can add in a color ramp, something like that, and now we're getting a pretty interesting result. Another thing you can do is take the velocity attribute. Let's type that in here. Then we'll take the color of this, plug it into the emission color, and now we're getting some very colorful looking flames. It's taking the velocity data and then using that to control the color of the emission. So those are just some cool examples, but now let's actually create a flame look. We're going to set the attribute here over to flame. We'll take the factor, plug it into the color ramp, and then we'll drag the black handle all the way over to the left so we bring back that flame data. To control this a bit more, we're going to add in a math node, switch the type to multiply, and then the bottom value, let's go with a value of around 50 or so. Then to control the color of this, let's press Shift D on this color ramp. We'll take the factor, and then for the color, this is going to go into the emission color. Now for this bottom color ramp, we're going to add in a new handle, drag this over to the left, and then this handle is going to be a reddish, orangish color, something like this. Then for the white handle, we're going to switch it over to a brighter yellowish color. Now, our colors are looking a bit dull, and the reason for that is because over in the render tab underneath the color management, we're using the AGX format, which I find dolls the colors of flames. So instead of using the AGX, we're going to switch it over to filmic and then set the look to high contrast. And that's going to give us a much more flame look. I might go up to 75 for that brightness, and then we'll just play through here and see what it looks like. And that is looking pretty neat. That's basically all we need to do for our material. I'm going to go ahead and close off this panel. We're not going to need it anymore. We'll position the camera right about here and then press Control all to Numpad zero to snap the camera to place. Then you can select it, drag it backwards a little bit. Then let's go over here and just select the density so we don't see that velocity color and then something like this. Now we are ready to do a final render. From here, you can set an output and then render this into frames and get a really nice simulation. But there we go. That is how you use Open VDBs in Blender. In the next video, we're again going to be using open VDBs, but this time, we're going to take a look at the volume to mesh modifier. 26. Volume to Mesh Modifier: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to take a look at the volume to mesh modifier in blender here. In order to get the volume to mesh modifier to work, we need to bake in a simulation or use another Open VDB that you've downloaded. For this simulation, I baked out a quick scene where we have some fire just on this UV sphere like that. What we're going to do here is import this back into this scene and then we're going to use the modifier. Over here, if you want to follow along, you can get this blend file and then bake this for yourself. It's not that high res, it's only 125, but make sure that the format volume is set to open BBB and you set a custom directory right here. Once you've done that, you can bake this and then you can continue on with this tutorial. Now that we've baked this in, let's go ahead and select all of these objects. We'll move them to a new collection by hitting M, move them to their own collection. Then we're just going to hide everything from this view. Now, to bring in that open VDB, let's press Shift A, go over to volume, and then select Import. Navigate to where your cache is minus right here. We're going to go to the data tab and then select A and then choose Import. Now that we have this in our scene, let's take a look at it. Over in the volumetric tab, you can select which attributes you want to preview. I want to preview the flame, and that is looking pretty good. Now what we need to do is we're going to add in a new object. We're going to press Shift A. We'll just add in any object. It doesn't really matter, just any mesh object. Then over here in the modifier tab, select Add modifier. Underneath the generate, we can select volume two mesh. Then for the object, we're going to be using the fluid data 001. We can see something is happening, but it's currently using the wrong attribute. Over here, you can see the attribute is using the density value, which is the smoke, there's not that much smoke in this simulation. What we need to do instead is use the flame attribute. We type in the word flame and now we can see our mesh has turned into flame and this is looking pretty cool actually. Below the grid name, we have a couple of different options for the resolution mode. Grid obviously is the one that you see right here. It just takes the grid of voxels and then adds the mesh to it. But then we can select the amount of voxels that we actually want in the scene. Again, the voxel is the resolution of the simulation. We can see here this is the amount of voxels that's currently set to 32, but we can go higher if we wanted to 64, for example, or if we wanted to do the normal amount, which is 120 because that's the resolution I baked this simulation as, we can go up to 120. We go any higher than 120, it will add more resolution, but it's not really going to change the general shape. You can see if I go lower, it's kind of changing the general shape, but if I go higher, it's not really going to change the general shape, it's just going to add more geometry to it, as you can see. The last one is voxel size. It's just another way. You can set the individual size of voxel that you want here. Lower values will, of course, add more resolution, and then higher values will decrease the resolution, giving us a more low poly look. The threshold value is basically the clipping amount for our flames. Higher values will, of course, clip out the smoke as you can see on screen. The adaptivity right here will basically lower the resolution in areas that it doesn't really need. For example, right here, there's not a lot of detail here. If I was to drag this value up, you're going to see it slowly gets rid of all of that detail. I'm going to say low polyversion while keeping the general shape. Usually, I just leave this at a value of zero. Then of course, you can turn on smooth shading if you want to. Now that we have a mesh though, there's a lot of other cool things that you can do with our simulation. For example, we can add another modifier on top of this. Let's say we add in a remesh modifier, switch the type over to blocks, and now we have a blocky simulation. Which looks pretty cool. Another thing that you can do is add a wireframe. So let's say here, I add a generate wireframe. I bring the voxel up a little bit so we get a lower resolution, something like that or so. And now we have a wireframe simulation. And then, of course, you can change the settings here if you want thicker lines, lower resolution. You can play around with this. It's very customizable because now we're dealing with a mesh rather than a volume object. You could even combine the remesh and the wireframe. So let's say I add in the remesh once again, I'll drag this above the wireframe, switch it to blocks, which looks pretty interesting. From here, if you wanted to bring in the smoke, what you could do is duplicate this object by hitting ship D, change the grid name from flame over to density, which is the smoke. Now we'll restart. We're going to probably need to change some of these values here. Maybe we'll go to the grid. And now if we play the simulation, we are getting this result. I might bring down the threshold, though, so it doesn't clip out a lot of that smoke, something like that. Then from here, you could change the material on this top one, but leave this bottom one as an emission and then the top can be more of a gray color, and you can get some really interesting results. I recommend jumping into blender, playing around with these different modifiers, combining them, seeing what you can create, and then render out a cool animation. 27. Viewport Render Animation: Everyone. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can render out a Viewport render or a Viewport animation of your simulation in Blender. This allows you to see what your simulation will look like in real time. Because right now in this simulation that I've created right here, if I try and play it in the timeline, we can see my frame rate is really, really low. It's only three FPS, which means it's very hard to see what this is going to look like as it's playing at a full 24 frames per second. To actually get this to render out a viewport animation, what you're going to want to do is position your camera where you want your viewport animation to go. So I'm going to position my viewport right around here. Then we're going to go up to view down to a line view and then select a line active camera to view. Or you can see the shortcut is Control Alt Numpad zero. Here, you can select the camera G to move it backwards, middle mouse button, and then we can place it somewhere around here. Now, technically, you don't really need to have the camera as your view. You could position your viewport right here and then do a full render. But it's kind of hard to see exactly what's going to be rendered because our view is not at the same aspect ratio or resolution as right here in the output. So for that reason, I like to use the camera instead. So to set this up, we can press Z, and then we can select toggle overlays. This is going to get rid of the grid, and if we're in solid view, if we're in wireframe, you're going to see the outline of the domain. If we're in solid view, that domain will disappear, which is really nice. From here, we can also hide those different objects are flow objects. I'm just going to select them, and then you can press H to hide them. I'm going to do that for all of them. Now looking at this, we have a full view of just the explosion, and now we can set up the viewport render, and we can only see the explosion, which is really nice. So what we need to do next is set an output of where we want our Viewport render to go to. And we can come over here to the output tab and set a folder right here by clicking that button on the side. I'm going to position it in this folder, and then you can give it a name. I'll just call it viewport animation, and then click except. Then for the file format, you're going to want to choose the movie file of your choice. I'm going to go with the container MPur another thing to keep in mind is over in the Render tab underneath the color management, if you have anything set up here, that will change the look of your viewport animation. For example, I have it on very high contrast right now, and we can see the background is like a dark gray color. And if I go over to view down to Viewport Render Image, this will allow you to render a viewport image. Going to see the background is much darker than what we see right here. Now, again, that is because we set that high contrast up. So keep that in mind when you do a Viewport animation. So now that we set up the output and we've set up the color management that we want, all we have to do is go over to view down to Viewport render animation. And this is going to go through each frame of our timeline and combine them into a movie file, and it's going to position that file in the output that you set. Now that the render has finished, we can go ahead and open up that folder and we can see the movie file right there. If we select it, we can now preview what our simulation will look like at the 24 frames per second. Now, this is very useful for previewing it and seeing what's wrong with your simulation and what you can improve on. So I highly recommend doing this method every time before you do a final render. 28. Smoke Material: Over one. In this video, we're going to take a look at creating a smoke material in blender, and we're going to go over attributes, how to use them, and how to create some really interesting effects. So here in this scene, I've created a basic simulation of a cube emitting smoke into our domain. What we're going to do is pause it right about there. Now, at the moment, if we press Z and go into the rendered view, we're not going to be able to see anything, and that's because we haven't set up any material yet. For this demonstration, we're actually going to be switching the render engine to cycles because there's a lot of interesting effects that we're going to go through that only apply to cycles. Right now we are currently in EV. Right now we are currently using the EV render engine, and don't worry in a later video, we're going to go over EV how to use it and all of the different values here in the volume tab. So for now, though, just to demonstrate how the smoke material works, let's switch the render engine to cycles. Now, again, we still can't see anything in our smoke. In order to bring our smoke into our rendered view, we need to add a material. We're going to select our domain object, then we're going to split this view and go over to the shading workspace. You can do this by jumping over to the top right corner of your viewport. When your cursor turns into a plus sign, you can click and drag to bring out a new window. From here, we can switch it over to the shading editor. Now you can jump over to the shading workspace at the top here, but this gives us a horizontal view of the shading editor, and I personally like the vertical view. So again, this is just a personal preference. You can use whichever one that you want. Once you're in the shading editor, we need to create a new material, and this will add a principled shader right here. We don't want this. We want the principled volume shader. So go ahead and delete that. Then press Shift Day, go over to Shader and then add in a principled volume shader. We'll take the volume and plug it into the material output. Once we've done this, now we can see our smoke in our scene. Now with this principle volume, this is an all in one shader that allows you to control the emission, the flame, the smoke, density, all of that. In previous versions of Blender a long time ago, you would have to add in a volume scatter, which you can find in the shader menu underneath the volume absorption and volume scatter. You would need to combine both of these nodes in order to get this same look. But now in a later version of blender, it's an all in one shader, which is very useful. Starting out at the very top, we're going to work our way down to where the absorption is right here. Then in the next video, we're going to take a look at the emission and how to add all of these different values here for the flames. The very top is the color attribute. From here, you can change the color of your smoke. You can see here, you can change it to blue, green, red, all of that, you can change with this color. Below that, though, is in color attribute value. Here is where you would type in an attribute to control the color. Now, we did talk about this in a previous video when we covered flow objects, but we'll go through it one more time. Going to create two different flow objects. I'm going to press Shift D on that and drag it over to the side, and then with this flow object, I'm going to set the smoke color to a different color, maybe like a blue, for example. Then we'll select the flow object on the right. This one is going to be a red color. Now when we play the simulation, we can see two different colors of smoke being emitted into our domain. The problem, though, if we go into the rendered view, we don't see that color. Now the reason for that is because we need to take that color data and plug it into our principal volume shader. We can do that by selecting the color attribute and typing the word color all lowercase, and then hit Enter, and now we can see the smoke color in our material. Now one thing to keep in mind though is that the color right here will also be mixed with the color attribute. For example, if we bring this over to a light blue color, you're going to see our colors are now changed because it's basically combining the color of flow objects with the color that we set here. If you don't want that and you only want to use the flow object color, you're going to need to make sure this value is all the way at white. Now you'll have the colors of the flow objects in your simulation. So keep that in mind. Another thing that you can do is instead of using the color attribute, you can use any other attribute that you want. For example, a really interesting effect that you could do is use the velocity attribute, and this will take the velocity data of your simulation and apply it to the color. Now we're getting this very interesting effect here. Now when we restart and play it, you can see it's taking that velocity data and influencing the colors, which gives us a very interesting result. Below the color attribute, we have a density value, and this is how dense the smoke is going to look. Usually, I bring this value up to around ten or so and that will give us a much nicer result. Now, the higher you go, the higher the density will be. For example, 1,000 will give us a very, very dense simulation here and you'll be able to actually see the individual voxils if we zoom in here, you can see the individual axles of our simulation. I'm going to bring this back down to a value of ten, and now below that, we have the density attribute. Again, you can use any attribute that you want. To test this out, I'm going to delete that P Shift A, we'll add in a UV sphere. We'll create a flow object with this and for the flow type, we're going to use the fire flow type and then I'll just set it to inflow. So now we'll play the simulation and we're getting this effect. Now, instead of using the density attribute which is for the smoke in the simulation, we can actually switch this over to the flame attribute. Now if we press Z and go into the rendered view, instead of using the flame, it's actually switching the flame over to a smoke material. So with this principle volume, there are so many interesting things that you can do. You can even take the temperature attribute, which is basically the temperature of the entire simulation. And now when we restart and play it, here is the effect that we get. Or if we just wanted to use the density, we can do that as well, and that gives us this effect. The last setting we're going to talk about in this video is the nosotropy. This is the direction at where the light will scatter when it enters the volume. With it set to a value of zero, it will scatter the light evenly and randomly in all directions. You can see here this is the effect that we're getting. Now, if we go over to a negative value, this will actually bring the light into the volume and then shoot it out in the direction at where the light was coming from. It's going to shoot it out on this side of the volume. You can see that if we move our viewport over to this side. If we go over to the other side, there is no light that's exiting because it's shooting it back in the direction where the light came from. If we go over to a positive value, this will do the exact opposite. The light will enter the volume and then shoot out in the same direction. So you can see here on this side on the opposite side of the light, you can see all the light is exiting out of this volume, whereas if we go over to this side where the light is coming from, there is no light to be seen here. So again, a value of zero will scatter the light randomly in all directions. A negative value will bounce the light back where it came from, and positive values will have the light continue in the direction that it was going. You can also have an absorption color and this is basically the color of the shadows in your volume. For example, if we go all the way up and give it a blue color, you can see all of the shadows on this left side have now turned over to that blue color, which can give some pretty interesting results because then you could change this to this color and now the highlights are red and the shadows are blue. But there we go. That is the smoke material in a blender. In later videos, when we create the explosion and other tutorials like that, we'll be creating more materials, but this is a basic overview of the entire thing. In the next video, we're going to take a look at the emission, black body, and temperature. 29. Fire Material: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to take a look at creating the fire material in blender. Here for this scene, I've created a basic simulation where we have a UB sphere emitting fire. The domain has a resolution of 96 right here, and then the flow object is just set to fire inflow and the fuel is at one. So with this basic setup, we have this principle volume shader with a density of five. If we press Z and go into the rendered view, we're not going to be able to see anything because it's super dark and the flame is not appearing in our scene. Now, in order to get that flame to appear in our rendered view, all we really need to do is bring up the black body intensity. This is basically the fire value. If we go all the way up to a value of one, now we're going to be able to see our flames in our scene. You notice that the flame is not that bright, you can bring up the black body intensity even higher. Let's go with a value of five, for example. Now we can see a lot more fire in scene and a lot brighter. Below the black body intensity is the black body tint. This is basically the tint of the fire. For example, if we go over to a blue color, you're going to see the bottom of our flame has that blue color now. This also works for green, for red, yellow, all of that. You can change the tint with this color value. Below the black body, tint is the temperature value. Now, this will also affect the look of the color. You can see on screen the different values and temperatures and how it changes the flame based on how hot or how cold the fire is. Example, with this temperature value, if we go with a much lower value like 200, for example, this is going to be a lot less hot, and now we're only getting a very small red flame. Whereas if we go much higher, like, let's say 2000, for example, we're going to get a much brighter flame, and the fire is technically much, much hotter. I'm just going to leave this at a value of 1,000. There's also the temperature attribute, and this again, you can change to whatever you want. If you wanted to use the density, you could switch that here, and now we're using the density to control the attribute. You can use the flame attribute. You can use the heat attribute. There's a lot of interesting attributes that you can play around with to get some interesting results. We're going to be talking about the heat in just a few minutes. For now, I'm going to bring back the temperature attribute. Now this setup right here is pretty good for the most part, but it doesn't give us a lot of control over the color or really how bright we want the fire to be. Normally, I don't use the black body intensity. Instead, I use the emission strength and emission color here to give us a much more control over how the fire looks. So we're going to set that up right now. I'm going to set the black body intensity back down to zero, and what we need to do is press Shift A. We need to add in a volume info node. We're going to be taking the flame attribute and plugging that into the strength, and emission color. We'll do that first. We're going to plug this into the emission strength. Now we do get the flame to appear, and then we could change the color here. But again, this doesn't give us that much control either. It's only one solid color. Whereas flames, if you look at a real life photo, it has multiple ranges of orange, yellow, white, black, all of that. We're going to add that in here. We're going to press Shift A, add in a converter, color ramp, we'll place that underneath here. Take the flame, plug it into the bottom input, then the color is going to go into the emission color. From here, let's add in a new handle. We'll drag this over to the left, and this is going to be a reddish orangish color. This is the very top of the flames. Then over here on the right side, we're going to set this to a much brighter yellowish color. This is kind of like the middle part. And then you can play around with these handles to give you different results. I might switch to this to more of a reddish color like that. Now currently, our flame is still not that bright in the scene. In order to fix that, we can add in a math node, place that here, switch the type over to multiply, and now the bottom value controls how bright the emission is going to be. Let's go with a value of around ten, now we're getting a much brighter flame in our scene. Again, we can change the color here and customize it however we like. The other thing that you can do to control the flame a bit more is add in a new color ramp and place that between the multiply node and the flame node right here. At this point, you can tweak how much flame is in your scene. If you drag the black handle closer to the right, it's going to clamp down on all of those values here and make the flames much shorter. The opposite will happen if you were to drag the white handle closer to the black handle, it's going to push the edge much closer like that, and now we have a much harsher edge to our flame. Another interesting effect that you can do is added another handle, place this on the opposite side of the white handle and now if we set this one over to black, we get a pretty interesting result here. Now the bottom of our flame has a lot less smoke and it's creating these interesting streaks of fire along the flame here. One thing I want to mention is that our colors look a little bit dull right now, and the reason this is happening is with the color management. If we jump over to the render tab, scroll down a little bit and open up the color management, the view transform is set to AGx. This gives us a slightly less saturated color than what you would normally see in flames. To bring this color in this color ramp with the bright orange and saturated yellows, we need to switch this over to the filmic mode. Then for the look, we can go with high contrast, and this is going to really make our simulation pop a lot more. Now we can see here this is looking a lot better than what it was previously. This is normally the setup that I use whenever I create fire and blender. I have the color ramp here to control how much fire I have in the scene. I have the multiple I note to control the brightness and then the color ramp here to control what the fire actually looks like. And this is a pretty good setup for most scenes. Now another thing that I like to do sometimes is use the heat attribute. Now with this volume info node, there is no heat attribute. Instead, we're going to be adding in the input attribute node and then typing the word heat right here. If we then take the factor of this, plug it into the color ramp, then right here, we're going to get a much more interesting looking flame. At this point though, the heat is way too high. We want to clamp down on all of these values, and so in order for that to happen, we can track the black value closer until we get the look that we want, something like this. Then over here in the color ramp, we can drag the red over to the right, then the black also we can drag over something like this. And this gives us a really interesting look as well. You can see we have a lot of detail in our flames here. If you're creating a still render, I recommend using this heat attribute here because this gives you a really interesting look in the flames. We have a lot of detail all along here. Then if you were to add the motion blur on top of it with the velocity scale here in the render tab, you're going to get a really nice looking flame. If you want to copy the notes set up here it is with the heat attribute, you definitely want to use this color ramp to clamp down on those values to get the perfect look for your flame. But there we go. That is how you add fire to your material in blender. In the next video, we're going to take a look at creating mist. 30. Advanced Volume Settings in Cycles: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to cover some more advanced settings when rendering volume metrics in cycles. In the next video, we're going to cover some similar settings in EV, but this video is specifically focused on cycles. To demonstrate these settings, I've created this basic scene where we have a sun lamp, a cube, a plain object, and then our camera is right here. If I go onto the camera view and press Z and go into the rendered view, here is what this cube looks like. Now, with this cube, I'm going to go ahead and open up the shader editor to show off what's happening here. I've added in a noise texture, and this is controlling the density of our principal volume. So that means you can see here the noise texture is controlling what the density looks like, and I can play around with it with this color ramp and I can control exactly what this noise texture is going to do. And the reason I set this up is because it will allow us to demonstrate what these settings do in a visual way. So first off, to understand how cycles renders volumes in Blender is with a step rate. And you can see the step rate setting over here in the render scene panel down here underneath the volumes, here is where the step rate render and viewport and Max steps are. Basically, a volume step is the distance between every single volume sample. The lower you set this value, the more detail will appear, but the longer it's going to take to render. Example, here in this viewport, we're not going to see anything if we turn up the render because we haven't rendered out an image, but to see this, we can change the viewport setting. If I bring up this viewpoint setting, which again, increases the distance between every single sample, you're going to lose out on a lot of detail. Let's bring this up to three. Already, you can see we've lost out on most of that detail because the distance is so high. If we go even higher, you're going to see even more detail is lost. The max steps right here is basically the number of samples in our volumetric shader. The moment, 1024 is more than enough. This is actually way more than we technically need. If we were to drag this lower, let's go all the way until we start to see a change here. It looks like right about there. Yeah, for this scene in particular, we only need around eight samples or so. You can see if I go any higher, it doesn't really matter because the eight samples is already covering the distance of our volume shader. Now if we were to bring up the viewport distance between those samples lower, let's say we go by 0.5. Now we're going to need to double our max steps here to get that same level. If we go up to 16, now that should be about number of samples that we need. If we go higher, we might see some details, but again, the max steps, we only need about 16 or so to get the full effect of our resolution. That is what the volume setting does. The lower you go with this value, the more samples will appear in your volume, but the longer it's going to take to render. Usually a value of one is perfectly fine. But again, if you want more detail, you could go lower and that's going to give you a lot more crisp shadows and detail in your volume metrics. Now the other thing I want to talk about in this video is over in the material properties. If we come over here and then scroll down over to the settings here, we can open up the volume option. It's underneath the settings right here, this volume tab. Now there are four different settings to go through. First off, the sampling option here. There are three different options, distance equiangular and multiple importance. These three settings allow you to change how the sampling works and how it's rendered. Distance is used for volume metrics that are further away, as you can see in that description. Equiangular is used for volumes that are closer and multiple importance is basically both of these combined. Most of the time, this is the better option, so I usually leave it on multiple importance. Below that, we have the interpolation and we have two different options here, linear and cubic. Linear is used for volumes that are pretty thin and not that dense and cubic is used to smooth out very dense smokes. You can see here on screen that with it set to cubic, it actually looks so much better and those individual voxels are now much more smooth as the smoke is going up. If your simulation looks very blocky, try changing it to cubic and see if that improves the look of your simulation. Below that, we have the homogeneous. Yes, I did look up how to pronounce that. Basically, what this does is it tells Blender that the object that you check it has the same amount of density everywhere on the object. All throughout it, it has the exact same amount of density. For this scene in particular, since we have a noise texture controlling the density, it's not going to work. If we turn this on, it's going to completely break what our object looks like. Now, if we were to open up the shader editor and remove this noise texture, then it would work because now the entire thing is the same amount of density throughout it. Now if we turn this off and turn it back on, not going to really change anything in the view because again, it is the same amount of density throughout the entire thing. Now the reason you would turn this on is to improve render time. For example, if you have a cup full of liquid and you apply a volume shader to that, you could set homogeneous on and that will speed up your render time a little bit. But if you have any textures or your smoke simulation, leave this off because it will break what your object looks like if you have different levels of density throughout it. And one more setting here is the step rate, and this is exactly what we talked about over here in the volumes tab. This is for the individual object, though. So for example, if I wanted this object to have more or less samples, I could change that here. If I go lower, you might see some improvement on your volume, or if you don't need that many steps, you could go higher like five, and that will help speed up render time on this specific object. So if you have multiple objects, you could mess around with the step rate for each one to improve your render time. One more setting I want to go through in this video is underneath the render properties. Down here in the light paths, we're going to cover the transparency rays right here. Whenever you render in cycles, there are a lot of different rays that bounce off surfaces, creating shadows and bounce lighting and all of that stuff and all of those different rays are controlled with the light pads. Now, there is one in particular that we want to take a look at and that is the transparency. If I zoom in here, you're going to see this really strange, blocky, transparent shadow right here. The reason this is showing up in our smoke simulation is because we need to increase the amount of transparency rays. With a set 28 and then we have these shadows, this means that we don't have enough transparency rays in our render. What we need to do is increase this to get rid of those random blocky shadows. Let's try a value of 16. You can see there with the set 216, that disappeared. Now let's go ahead and take a look everywhere else in our scene. And it looks pretty good. A value of 16 did work for this simulation. Now I have noticed, though, on some occasions where 16 is not enough and I do need to bring that up higher. That is one small trick. If you're getting those really annoying blocky shadows, try increasing the amount transparency max bounces here to a higher value and that will help get rid of all of those different blocky shadows. 31. Advanced Volume Settings in EEVEE: Over one. In this video, we're going to cover the advanced settings for EV when it comes to rendering volumes. Now in a previous video, we did cover the volumes tab here with the resolution, the steps distribution, and all that kind of stuff. But one thing that we didn't cover is over in the shadows. If we open up the shadows, there is an option for volume shadows. If I press Z and go into the rendered material preview here, and this cube is the exact same cube as the previous video with the noise texture, we're going to see we don't have a lot of shadows in our object. If we go ahead and enable volumetric shadows, now we're going to get a lot more detail in our object here. Now the amount of detail is also determined by the steps right here. If I bring this lower like a value of one, we're not going to get that many shadows here. You can see most of them are actually gone. So in order to increase the detail in our shadows, we need to increase this setting. I found that a value of around 64 actually works pretty well for most simulations, including smoke simulations. So if you're not getting that many shadows and not that much detail in your smoke simulation, try turning on your steps in the EV render engine. Now, another thing I want to talk about in this video is over in the material tab. If we jump over to the material tab, we'll scroll down a little bit underneath the settings again here, we're going to open up the volume tab. Now, there are two different methods here underneath the intersection, fast and accurate. Fast works for most scenes, but there is one major limitation to it. If I go into Edit mode and I delete this top face here, and so now we have a non manifold mesh, fast is not going to work for this object. If I press Z and now go into the material preview, you're going to see this looks absolutely terrible. There are so many weird intersections going on. It just doesn't work. The top side is all messed up. Now the reason this isn't working is because the fast method does not work with non manifold meshes. It just doesn't accurately calculate what the volume is supposed to look like. Order to get a non manifold mesh to actually produce a accurate volume, you need to switch the type over to accurate. Now, if we look underneath, now we can see this is actually working somewhat properly at the top here. It doesn't look that good, but underneath at the bottom, now this is producing the result that we want with it set to accurate. So if you notice sometimes that your object is not rendering properly the volumes and it's just distorting, try switching the volume mode here from fast over to accurate and that might fix your issue. For the most part, if you have a full mess here, let's go ahead and reenable a face in edit mode there. Now if we go into renewed view, this will work properly, and most of the time, the fast method will work faster and it will render a lot faster as well. So I would leave it on there for the most part unless you really need to change it over to accurate. 32. Creating Mist P1: Hello, everyone. In this video, we're going to go through the process of creating mist in Blender. We're first going to create the simulation, bake it out, and then we'll create the material and then render it out in EV. So here in this default scene in Blender, we're first going to use this cube to be our domain object. And for the size of this, I'm going to press N, and I'm going to set the dimension for the X and Y up to a value of 5 meters. And then for the Z, I'm going to go up to a value of 4 meters. Then we'll drag this up so it's sitting right on the grid floor. For the other objects in my scene, I'm going to press Z and go into wireframe. Let's press Shift A and add in a mesh, and then we'll add in a UV sphere. This is going to be the emeter object. Scale it down to around 1 meter for the dimensions, and we'll just drag it up and then maybe place it over here on the left just slightly, something like that. The other thing I want to add is a collision object for all of the smoke and miss to collide with, for that, let's just add in a new cube. Scale this cube down along the Z axis and then we'll scale it along the Y, so it's a bit longer. Then in the front view, I'm just going to place it right about here or so so that the UV sphere will collide with it, a lot of miss will hit it and then go over the edge. Something like this will look pretty interesting. Now that we have all of the objects in our scene, let's box select all of them and then press Control A and then apply the scale to them so that all of the numbers go back to one. This will make sure that the simulation works properly. Now let's create the simulation with the object selected. We'll come over to the outliner. We'll call this object domain just to keep everything organized. The sphere, we will call this flow, and then cube 001, which is this cube here, we're going to call this one collision. Again, starting out with the domain first, let's go over to the physics tab, select fluid, change the type from none over to domain. We're going to leave the type on gas and before we change anything else, let's scroll down to the bottom here and change the type from replay over to modular so we can actually bake this in. I'm also going to turn on I resumb just in case we want to stop the bake and then for the end frame, let's go with 200. Let's match that in the timeline as well. We'll set this to 200. Now let's scroll up back to the top and start out with the resolution divisions. For the resolution for this scene, I found 128 looks pretty good, or you could go up to 160, which I think that's what I'm going to do. That's going to give us a nice high res simulation. The CFL number, I'm going to go up just slightly, so it bakes just a little bit faster with a value of four. Down here, I'm going to enable the bottom border collision, the smoke actually collides with the bottom of the domain. Then scrolling down a little bit more, we're going to enable the adaptive domain, so it bakes much faster. Then here in the gas settings, we're going to change the density and the heat values. With them set to a positive value right here, the smoke is going to rise. Instead of having a positive value, let's set both of these values to negative five. Now when we bake in the simulation, the smoke will be emitted and flow downwards and then sink to the bottom of the domain, which is exactly what we want. As for the rest of the settings, we don't really need to change anything else. Let's go ahead and work on the collision next with this cube selected. We'll enable fluid, set the type over to afector, and then for the surface thickness, I'm just going to go up to a value of around 0.1. The flow object, go ahead and select your UV sphere, select fluid, set the type over to flow. For the flow behavior, we're going to go with inflow. And then underneath the initial temperature, we're going to go up higher to a value of two. Remember, the initial temperature is how fast it gets emitted, and since the density of the smoke is set to a negative value, bringing the initial temperature up higher is going to allow the smoke to flow down faster. We're also going to open up the flow source and set the surface emission to a value of one. And then finally, before we bake this in, I want to make sure that the flow actually turns off at a certain point in the timeline. So what we're going to do is jump over to frame 100. We're going to add in a keyframe to that use flow. Then we're going to go to the next frame 101, uncheck the use flow, and then add in another keyframe. So now it's going to remain off for the rest of the simulation. With that done, we can go ahead and bake this in. Make sure you press Control Shift S to save your project. I'm just going to call this missed tutorial, save as. And now we're ready to bake this in. Select your domain. If you want to add in a directory here so you don't lose your bake once you close the file, you can go ahead and set that here. Since I don't really care for that, I'm doing this in one take. I'm just going to leave this as a temporary folder, so it automatically gets deleted after I close this project. So with that in mind, click on BAC data. Once the BC has finished, we're going to jump over into the material editor, create the material, and then render it out in EV. 33. Creating Mist P2: Over one. In this video, we're going to continue on with the miss tutorial, and in this one, we're going to create the material for our smoke. So to get started, let's set up the scene so we can actually see the material a little bit better. I'm going to press Shift A and add in a mesh and a plane object. If your plane is somewhere outside of the grid, you can press the Alt key or the option key and Alt G, that's going to snap it back to the center of the grid. Then you can scale it up pretty big. For the lighting on the scene, I'm going to use the default lamp here over in the lamp settings. I'm going to set the power of this right here. This is the strength of how bright the lamp is going to be. We're going to go all the way up to 2000. Then we're just going to go into top view by hitting seven and maybe move it somewhere over here. We can also press Shift D on this lamp, bring it over to this side. I want to set the strength of this a bit lower. This is going to be more like a fill light. We're going to go up to around 400. And then for the radius, which is the size of the lamp, going to go up higher because this is going to be a softer shadow lamp. Something like that will look pretty good. If we press Z and go into the rendered preview, here is what our current scene looks like. I'm going to go over to the world settings, bring the background just a bit darker. Something like that will look pretty good. Now to actually bring in that smoke shader, we need to select our object, which is this object here, the domain, and we're going to come up to the top window here, split this view, and switch it over to the shader editor once again. Now at the moment, it's using the principled shader, which is not what we want. So go ahead and select this node and press X to delete it. Then we're going to press Shift A, go over to Shader and then add in a principled volume shader. Take the volume and plug it into the volume of the material output. Now, if we bring up the density a little bit and then play through our simulation, we should be able to see what our smoke looks like. Now we will be using IV for this render here, and I'm going to show you how IV works with some of the different settings for volumes. But at the moment, we can see our smoke is not looking that good. It's very dark. It's not having that, white miss color. And you might think to select the color here and drag it all the way up to white, and that does help a little bit, but you can still see it's still very dark and it's hard to see what's going on. So first off, we're going to jump over to the render settings over here in EV and then open up the volume tab here. The resolution is basically how good the smoke is going to look in the viewpoard and in the render. At the moment, it's at almost the lowest setting. 1.6 is the very lowest, and you can see that's very pixelated. So instead of using 1.8, we're going to go up to 1.2. 1.1 will be the highest quality, but it's going to really increase the render time in your simulation here, if we switch it to 1.1, it's going to slow down the viewport quite a bit and if we zoom in here, we'll switch it back to 1.2. You can see there's hardly any difference. So with a value of 1.2, the runner time will decrease quite a bit and it's going to make our viewport nice and smooth here. I'm going to leave it at 1.2. The other thing we're going to do is open up the shadow tab and then turn on volumetric shadows. This is going to allow the shadows in the volume to actually appear. You can see here, if I turn this off, that shadow disappears. If I turn it on, we get some shadows right there. At the moment, this is looking better, but we can still see it's not looking like mist. Now with blender, it's really hard to actually get the white color of mist to show up. So we're going to use a little trickery with the material to actually get the white look. To do this, we're going to come over here. We're going to press Shift A, add in a input and then a volume info node. Basically, what we're going to be doing here is taking the density of this volume info and plugging that into the emission. The smoke is actually going to emit light just a little bit to give us that white look. Then I'll show you a trick on how to get the emissive light from the smoke to not affect any other object in the scene, but only the look of it in the camera. So what we're going to do here is press Shift A. We're going to add in a converter and then a color ramp. Then we're going to add one more node here. It's going to be the math node. We're going to take the density, plug it into the color ramp, then the color is going to go into the bottom value of this multiply node. We need to switch it over to multiply. Then this value is going to go into the emission. Let's set the value here up to around one or so and already you can see we're getting a lot more of that white color, which is looking pretty good here. What I want to do is actually mix this multiply node with some density here. I'm going to set the density of the smoke to a value of five. Then the emission right here, I'm going to go up to around four or so and we'll see what that looks like. That's looking pretty good. It might be a bit too high, so maybe we'll go with a value of three. Then with this color ramp, you can play around with this black handle to get some more shadow effects here. And that is looking actually pretty good. If you want to, you can give it a slight color, just a slightly blue color to give it more of that misty look. Maybe the emission color, we can do the same thing, a very slight blue color, something like that. Now in EV, this setup here is not going to affect any other object. It's not going to have light be emitted onto the cube or the plane here. But if we were to switch over to cycles, and let's just go ahead and hide both of these lamps right here, you're going to see the smoke is actually affecting the surrounding areas, which isn't really what we want. Maybe that's the look you're going for. But to make this so that the light does not affect the surrounding areas, what we need to do is over here, we're going to press Shift D on this multiple node, place it right here. Then we're going to add in a new node. It's underneath input. It's going to be the light path node. We're going to take the I camera ray and plug that into the multiply node. Basically, what this is doing is it's telling Blender that the smoke emission should not affect anything on the scene but the camera. So we're only going to be able to see the emissive light from the camera view here. And you can see this is working. It's still emitting the light, but it's not affecting the surrounding area. And that is looking pretty good. Then from here, if you're using cycles, you could tweak this a little bit, maybe go up to a value of five. That looks pretty good. But since we're using IV, I'm going to switch back and then I'll press Alt H to bring back those lamps here. Next on our list, we're going to come over to the render tab underneath the color management down here at the bottom. I'm going to set the look to high contrast, so we get some nice contrast in the scene, and that is looking a lot better. Finally, before we render this out, let's create the material for our sphere here. So go ahead and select it. We'll create a new material. And what we're going to do here is add in this glass ice shader to give this a look that it's actually emitting like mist or dry ice into the scene. To do this, we're going to set the roughness here, which is how much glossiness appears on our object. Let's go all the way down 2.1. We can also right click and shade it smooth to get rid of all of those faces here and now we have a nice smooth sphere. Next, we're going to press Shift A, go over to texture, and then add in a noise texture here. Now, what we can do if we want to see what this noise texture is doing, we can come up to the edit menu down to your preferences and make sure you have the node wrangler add on enabled. You can type in here node wrangler and you should be able to see it here. If you don't see it here in the add ons tab, you can go over to the G extensions and then just type it in here. Node, wrangler, and you should be able to see it right here. Since I've already enabled it, it's not going to show up, but just in case you can find it in the Get extensions. Sure that's enabled. And now if we press Control Shift and Left click on this noise texture, we can see what it's looking like on our object, and that's actually looking pretty good. What we're going to do is bring up the detail amount. We'll leave the scale at five, and then the roughness, I'm going to drag up to around 0.8 or 0.9. And now this is looking a lot more like dry ice or, like, a really rough texture. What we're going to do next is press Shift A, add in a converter color ramp, give this a bit more contrast. Something like that will look pretty good. Then to plug it into our principled shader, we're going to not have it there. We're going to press Shift A. We're going to add in a vector bump node. Take the color, plug it into the height, and then the normal is going to go into the normal of the principled shader. Now the strength of this is way too high, so let's go down to around 0.5 or so. And that's looking pretty good. If you want to get rid of some of that shading, weird shading issues right here, we can press Control two with this object selected, and that's going to add in a subdivision surface modifier. And now you can see it's nice and smooth. I think the strength is still a bit too high, so we'll go down to around 0.3 or so. And then for the color, we just have to go with a slightly blue color to match the look of our smoke here. As you can see there, that is looking pretty good. I don't really like how the rings are showing up on our sphere, and that's because of the lamp. So what we can do is just bring up the roughness slightly and something like that, we'll get rid of those rings. I might set the noise texture roughness a bit lower so we get some more detail right there. I think that's going to look a bit better, around 0.6. Yeah, that is looking more like the look that I want. Alright. Now that we've set up the scene, let's position the camera and render this out. You can go ahead and close off this window here by clicking and dragging to the right. I'm going to position my viewport right about here and then press Control Alt Numpad zero to snap the camera to place. Select it, then you can hit G, middle mouse button to drag it backwards. We'll place it somewhere around here. Then over in the output tab, you can set an output of where you want your render to go to. You can do that by clicking the directory button on the side, navigating to a folder and I'm just going to place it here and call it miss tutorial result. Then hit Accept. Now, since we're using EV, this will render pretty quickly, so I don't find the need to actually sequence it as a PNG. We're just going to go with a movie file, so it does it automatically for us. The container, we're going to go with MP four, and that's basically all we really need to do. From here, save your project and then go over to render and then hit Render Animation. Once it's done, you'll be able to see it in your directory where you place the output. There we go. That is how you create a mist effect in blender. In the next video, we're going to take a look at EV again and we're going to create a fire simulation. 34. Creating Fire Simulation In EEVEE: A one. In this video, we're going to go through the process of creating a fire simulation and then rendering it out in EV, we're going to go through all of the different settings on the EV render engine and how to render volumes and fire and all of that. To get started, here we are in a brand new scene, you can go ahead and open a blender if you want to follow along. What we're going to do first is press X and delete the default cube, and then we'll add in a mesh, and we're going to add in a UV sphere. This is going to be our flow object. I'm going to press N and set the dimensions a bit lower. Let's go with a value of around one. Then I'm going to right click and shade it smooth so we get some nice smooth shading and then also press Control or Command A and then select scale. All of these numbers go back to one. Now to add in a domain object, we're going to go up to object down to quick effects, and then we'll add in a quick smoke. This is going to automatically add a domain for us. Let's drag this up a bit. Actually, let's just drag all of the objects up so it's sitting on the grid floor. Maybe scale the domain up slightly, something like that will look pretty good. Since we scaled everything up, I'm again going to press Control A and apply the scale. Let's start out with the domain settings first, go ahead and select it over in the physics tab. We're going to go for a very realistic simulation with EV. What we need to do is set the resolution quite high. Before we do that, though, I'm going to scroll down to the bottom, set the type over to modular, and then check I resumb just in case I want to stop the bake. Next, we're going to go back up to the top and set the resolution divisions all the way up to 256. Now, this is quite a high resolution, and if you have a lower NPC, you could go with a lower value like 196 or 128, that's still going to look pretty good. But if your computer can handle it, you can go with 256. Next, we're going to turn on adaptive domain so it bakes a little bit faster. The vorticity in the smoke, I'm going to go up just slightly to 0.05. Underneath the fire tab, we're going to set the reaction speed down to around let's go with 0.5, so the flame is a bit taller. Also, make sure that the CFL number is also set to four. I think that's going to be a little bit better with the baking. And then the end frame, I don't need 250 frames. So we're going to go down to around 200. And again, we covered this in the miss tutorial. If you want to save your cache in a directory, you can click on this button on the side and save it to a custom folder. Since, again, I don't really need to save the cache, I'm doing this in one take. I'm going to leave it at the temporary folder. The vorticity here in the fire. I'm also going to go up just slightly to 0.6. That's going to give us some more randomness in the flames. For the flow object, go ahead and select it. For the flow type, we're going to switch it over to fire. Then in the flow source here, let's set the surface emission down to around 0.1. This is going to bring the fire closer to the surface of the mesh. And finally, we're going to add in a texture because I want the texture to move around as the simulation is plain and that's going to give us a much more organic looking simulation. To do this, we're going to jump over to the texture tab, create a new texture here. For the type, it's going to be set to clouds. For the size here, we're going to go down 2.1. We're going to open up the colors here and bring the contrast up a bit higher so we get some more definition between the white and black values. I think that is looking pretty good. Back over to the physics tab, we're going to animate the offset so the texture moves around as it's plain. On frame one, we're going to hit the button on the side to add in a keyframe. We're then going to jump all the way to frame 200 right here, set the offset to around 0.8, and then add in another keyframe. One thing to keep in mind, the interpolation between these two keyframes is a curve, and you can actually see this if we split this view. You don't have to do this. I'm just showing this for demonstration. The graph editor here, this is what our current animation looks like. So basically, what's going to happen is it's going to start out pretty slowly here. You can see the curve is at a very shallow angle, and then right in the middle, it's going to be speeding up here, and then at the end, it's going to slow down. This is going to create some kind of weird results with the texture because it's going to start out slow, speed up in the middle, slow down at the end. So instead of this, we want it to be a straight line. So what we can do is in the timeline here, you can box select both of these keyframes and then hover your mouse right here and press T, and you can switch it over to linear. So now you can see here that the animation is a straight line, and now this is moving at a constant rate through the entire animation, and that's what we want. So now that we've set that up, we're going to set the end frame and the timeline to 200 to match the length of our animation, and now we are ready to bake this in. So make sure you save your project before you do this just in case this crashes. I'm going to call this EV flame tutorial, save blender file. Now we'll just double check everything is good, which I think it is. Go ahead and click on Bake data. Once the Bake has finished, we're going to go over the material and then we'll render this out. The Bake has finished and here's our results. We're going to go ahead and play through this fire simulation and you can see it's actually looking pretty good. What we're going to do now in this video is create the material and then render this out in the EV render engine. Starting out with, let's jump over to the world settings. I'm going to set the color all the way down to black so we get a nice black background. Then we're going to go into front view by hitting one on the number pad. Hit Control Alt Numpad zero to snap the camera to place, then you can select it. G, middle mouse button and position the camera how you want to see your fire. This is looking pretty good. Let's press Z and go into the rendered view to see what everything looks like. Now, since we use the quick smoke option, it automatically added the material for us. What we're going to do now is jump up here to the top right corner, split this window, and switch it over to the shader editor. With the domain selected, we can see that we have the principled shader right here. Now, we did talk about flame materials in a previous video where you could turn up the black body intensity, but you're going to see it just doesn't really look that good. It's not as bright as I would like it to be. Instead of using the black body intensity, we're going to be using the flame attribute. So over here on the left side, let's press Shift A and add in a volume info node. Then we'll add in a converter color ramp node, and then finally a converter math node and place it here. We're going to take the flame attribute, plug it into the color ramp, and then also into the top input of the math node. Take the color, plug it into the emission color, then take the math node and plug it into the emission strength. We're going to switch this over to multiply. For the bottom value, let's go all the way up to ten, so we get a nice bright flame. For the colors of our flame, that's going to be with this color ramp. We're going to add in a new handle and drag it over to the left here and then switch it over to a dark reddish color. This is the very top of the flames and the very outside, as you can see. For the right handle, this is going to be a nice yellow orangish color. Something like that will look pretty good. Then you can play around with these positions. If you want more red to appear in your flame or less red, you can play around with this. I think something like that will look pretty good. Now at the moment, our flame looks very pixelated and the reason that's happening is over in the render settings, underneath the volumes tab, we have a lot of different options to tweak how the simulation looks. The biggest setting is the resolution right here. At 1.8, you're going to get a very low resolution fire simulation here or smoke simulation. What we need to do is switch this up higher to around 1.2 or 1.1. 1.2 works for most simulations, and you can see here this actually looks a lot better. On screen, you can see the differences in resolution. You're going to notice the 1.1 is significantly longer than the 1.2 and there's not a lot of difference in quality. For the most part, whenever I render EV, I use the 1.2 just because it renders so much faster and there's hardly any difference between 1.1 and 1.2. Moving on, we have the steps setting here, and this is basically the samples. You're going to see if I zoom in here and I bring the samples much lower, you're going to see it starts to get really pixelated. This is the effect of what the samples is. If I go higher, you're going to see it brings more layers of fire in and then it starts to look a lot better. Normally, 64 is perfectly fine. You're not going to really see any pixelation with that value. Distribution will allow more samples to become closer to the camera, as you can see in that description. If you go all the way up to one though, for some reason, you're going to get some weird pixelation here on the top of the fire and the sides of it. Normally, I will set this to around 0.8. That's usually a good option for this simulation. Below the distribution, we have the max depth. And basically, what the max depth is is the amount of surface interactions between the different volume objects. If there are more interactions and intersections, then the value that you set for the max depth, it might cause an artifact or some flickering in the render. With a lot of my testing, I couldn't really find any difference between a value of one or 16. But if you're having some flickering issues, it might be a good idea to turn this value up. Finally, in the custom range option here, you can set the distance from the camera where you want volumes to actually appear. For example, if I were to bring up the start past the distance from the camera to where our fire is right now, the flame will start to disappear. You can see here, if I go past it, the flame disappears. Same thing for the end frame. If I go below where the distance is between the camera and the fire, the fire will slowly disappear. In previous versions of blender, what you would want to do is actually set the exact distance from where the fire is and where the fire ends from the camera and then put those values in right here. But in this new version of EV, you don't really need to change anything right here. The fire will still look really good no matter the distance that you set here. But for example, if you had volumes really far on the distance that you don't really want to be rendered, you could set the start and end values here. Before we render this out, we're going to jump over to the color management tab and set the look right here to high contrast. This is going to really make our render pop a lot more, and the colors are going to look a lot better. Now, you could switch the view transform from AGX over to filmic, and that's going to give you a more saturated flame, as you can see there. I think AGX though, for this scene in particular, looks a bit better, so I'm going to leave it on that. Then finally, we can hide the sphere from the render and hide it from the viewport right there. With that done, let's press F 12 to render out a single image. What we're going to do now is press Escape to exit out of there and then jump over to the compositing workspace. We're going to select use nodes, and then what we're going to do is actually add a bit of glow to the flame. With the render layer selected, you can hit Control Shift and Left Click. That's going to add in a viewer node and display the rendered image that we just had. Another thing I like to do is hold Shift and then right click and that's going to make a connection point and we're going to put this right there. Now, anything that we put between the render layers and this connection point will automatically be applied to both the viewer and the composite, which is nice. What we're going to do next is press Shift A, go over to a filter right here and then add in a glare node. We're going to place that here. Now, in the glare settings, you can change it to whatever one that you want. If you wanted the original bloom that was in EV before blender 4.3, you could set it to bloom, play around with the strength or sides of it, or you could set it over to fog glow, which I think looks a bit better. From here, we can bring down the strength if it's a bit too strong of an effect. If you want these size to be smaller or bigger, you can play around with that. I might go up to value of 0.6. I think that looks pretty good. And that's basically all we really need to do. From here, we're going to jump back over to the output tab. We're going to switch this over to a movie file because again, we're using EV. It's going to render very quickly. Use in MP four, and for the output quality, we're going to go with high. Then for the directory, make sure you set a custom folder of where you want all of your frames to be combined into a movie file, and then we can come up to render and then select render animation. There we go. Here's our final result of our flame using EV, and as you can see, it does look pretty good. There we go. We've now completed this section of this course. In the next section, we're going to be looking at creating a campfire scene with sparks, realistic materials, and rendering out a good looking animation. 35. Creating a Campfire Simulation P1 Setup: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new section. In this one, we're going to be creating this campfire scene that you see on screen. We're going to go through the process of adding in the simulation, creating some different effects with wind force fields. We're then going to be adding in some spark particles, motion blur, compositing. All of that we're going to cover in this section. To get started, you can download this blend file. It has a campfire model right here with a couple of different logs, some embers right here and a couple of rocks around it. Once you have it downloaded, we can go ahead and get started. You can find this blenfle in the resources. First, we're going to need a domain object. Now one thing to keep in mind that this scene right here, if I press N and look at the size of this ember circle right here, it's 2 meters wide, that is a very large flame. Now the reason why it's so big is because Blender has a hard time simulating at a small scale. What we're going to be doing is creating the simulation and then we're going to scale everything down later on in this section. That being said, let's press Shift A. We're going to first add in our domain object. We'll add in a cube. In front view, I'm going to hit Z and wireframe, bring this up a little bit, and then just ski it along the Z axis. It's a bit taller. You can probably have it around 2.8 or so. Something like that will be perfectly fine. Then we'll make sure that the bottom of the domain is right about there. Then press Control A and apply the scale so that number goes back to one. Now for the flow object, this object is going to be a little bit different. We're first going to add in a plane. Then in edit mode, I'm going to press M and merge everything at the center. Now we have a single vertex to work with. Basically, what I want to do is create a really random looking inflow object because this is going to give us some more random variation. You can do is with that single vertex selected, you can press E to extrude and just start extruding it out and following the shape of our logs right here, something like this, extruding until we get the shape that we want. Something like this will be perfectly fine. It doesn't really need to be perfect, just random. Then what you can do is press A to select everything, find the last two of them, and then just press F to fill in an edge right there. Now we have this shape like this. Then with this selected, I'm going to press A and then press F again with everything selected, and that's going to fill in a face. So now this will emit fire once we add that in. Then I also want to just drag this up slightly. So it's right about there. I think it is probably good. Now that we have the flow object domain object, let's start working on the simulation. Let's first select a couple of the different logs right here. I'm going to select the domain and press H to hide it so we can actually see the logs, and we're going to be adding in some collision to these different logs. Now, we don't have to add collision to all of them, just the main ones on the top here. What I'll do is hold Shift and select all of them. Go over to the physics tab. If you hold the Alt key and then left click on that fluid, then holding the lt key again, none and select effector, you're going to see that it automatically added that fluid modifier to all of these objects here. Now, one thing that we're going to want to do is drag this above everything else because at the moment with it at the very bottom, it's going to take into account the subdivision surface, the displacement, and it's going to take longer to bake. When we have the modifier at the top here, it's going to take in this low polymesier and use that for the collision, which will allow it to bake a lot faster. Going to do this for all of them, drag it to the top here, right here, and then this one we will also drag to the top. Now if you wanted to, you could also add it to this one, but since this one is behind the flame, we're not going to really see it in the render, so I think I'm just going to leave it off. Next, we're going to select all the logs that we have the modifier applied to it. Once again, jump back over to the physics tab. Holding the Alt key, I'm going to select the surface thickness and then hit 0.1 and Enter. Now again, if you held the Alt key, it should have automatically added it to the other objects, which it did. There we go. That is good. Let's press Alt H or option H to bring back our domain object. Then over in the physics tab, we're going to hit fluid, set the type over to domain. For the resolution divisions, let's go up to 160. Since we're going for a realistic simulation, we want to go pretty high with the resolution. The timescale, I noticed that the flame moves very quickly. We're going to bring this down a little bit to around 0.7. The CFL number, I'm going to go up to three. This will help make it bake just a little bit faster. We don't really need any border collisions, but we are going to want to turn on adaptive domain. Then for the Ad resolution, I'm going to go up to a value of one so the domain will actually move upwards if the smoke reaches that height. Below that, we can leave the default settings for the heat and density, the vorticity we can leave at zero. If you wanted some swirls in your smoke, you could go up to around 0.5, but I think it's fine as it is. We're going to open up the fire tab and for the reaction speed, we're going to go down to around 0.65. This will allow the flames to be a bit taller in our simulation. Then for the forticity here, I'm going to go up 20.55. That'll just make the simulation move a bit more random. Down here in the cache setting, we're going to set the end frame to 200. We'll set the type over to modular and then is resumable just in case we want to bake this in. Then for the format volume, we're going to leave on open DB right here. In the render tab right here, we're going to set the velocity scale, which is the amount of motion blur in our simulation. You can change this after it's already baked. But since we're already here, let's set this to 0.03, and enter. With a value of one, it's way too strong, so that is why we're having it at such a low number. Now we're going to work on the inflow object next, go ahead and select it right here, right there. We're going to add in a fluid, set the type over to flow, and for the flow type, we're going to choose fire. For the flow of behavior, we're going to use inflow obviously. Then for the fuel right here, this will control the height and how crazy the fire is. We're going to go up a little bit to around 1.2. In the flow source, we can leave all the other settings as they are. We could go up for the surface emission if you wanted to, maybe 1.3, I think would be pretty good. Now, since this object is a flat plane, we're going to want to turn on is planar, so it actually emits smoke into our simulation. The object isn't moving, so we don't really need any initial velocity, but we will want to add in a texture here. We're going to jump over to the texture tab and create a new texture. For the type, we're going to choose clouds and then for the size of this cloud, let's go down to around 0.1. We're going to open up the contrast here, bring up the contrast so we can get more definition between the white and black values. Now wherever there is white values, that will mean there will be fire. Wherever there is black values, there will be no fire. This is going to give us a much more random and organic looking simulation. Then we're going to jump back over to the physics tab and offset the texture here as the simulation is plain. On frame one, we're going to add in a keyframe to the side of that offset. Then we're going to jump all the way to the end, which is frame 200. We can set that in the timeline here. We'll set the offset up 2.8 and then add in another keyframe here. Of course, we're going to need to box select these keyframes and set the interpolation between them to linear, so it moves at a constant rate like this. I did that by selecting them, pressing T, and choosing that linear option here. Now before we bake this in, there is one more thing that we're going to need to add, and that is a wind force field. Since this is a campfire scene, we want to make sure that the flames have a little bit of movement like it's outside. What we're going to do is press Shift A at an a force field, and then a wind force field right here. Go into front view, rotate this so the wind is facing the direction of the flames. Now at the moment, it's way too strong. It's going to have the flame go almost completely sideways. For the strength here in the physics tab, we're going to go much lower to around 0.1 for the strength. We're going to set the flow to zero, and then the noise amount, we're going to go lower as well to around 0.1 here. Actually, for the strength, this is actually not what we want. We want 0.01. A very, very low strength, that's just going to give it a slight movement to the right. With that done, we are ready to bake this in. If you want to set a directory for your cache so you don't lose it, you can do that here by clicking that button on the side. I'm just going to save it to this folder here and click Accept, and now we are ready to bake this in. Scrolling back up to the top here, save your project one more time, and then click on Bake data. Once this is done, we're going to work on the particle system. 36. Creating a Campfire Simulation P2 Sparks: All right, the simulation has finished baking and here is the results. If we scroll through here, we can see the flame looks pretty good. Now, in this video, we're going to be adding in the spark particles. To get started, let's press Shift A. We're going to add in a new mesh object. It's going to be a circle. Go into edit mode and then press F to fill in a face right here, so it's completely full. Then we're just going to scale this down to be about the size of our campfire right here. Probably somewhere around there will be pretty good. Next, what we're going to do is drag it up just slightly, so it's inside the camp fire just like that. Then over in the particle system tab, we're going to create a new particle system. Now, the number of particles you can play around with this value, you can add in a lot of particles or just a little bit. I'm going to go somewhere in the middle around 300 particles. The start frame is when the particles will start being emitted. We want to leave that at one, and then the end frame is when they'll stop emitting. We're going to also leave that at 200 to match the start and end frame. The lifetime value here controls how long the particles will last in our scene. We're going to leave this also at the default value of 50. Next, we're going to come down all the way to the bottom here underneath the field weights and turn gravity all the way down to zero because what we're going to be doing next is adding in a force field to have it follow the flow of the fire. To do that, we're going to press Shift A and go over to force field down here and then add in a fluid flow force field. If we go over to the physics tab now, we can change the strength and we can select the domain object in our scene. If we go ahead and play our simulation, we'll select our domain here and we can see the name of it is set to cube. With the fluid flow force field, you might need to go into wireframe to select it. We're going to set the strength of the force field to three. This will allow the particles to shoot higher into the air. Then for the domain object, we're going to select the cube. Now if we play the animation, they should follow the shape of our smoke here. With that done, let's jump back over to the particle system. I'm going to select the circle in the outliner right here. With the gravity at zero, we can go ahead and close that off. We're going to open up the velocity tab, set the normal amount to zero, and then the Z direction, which is the initial velocity going upwards, we're going to set that 2.5, so the particles move a bit faster going up, and then also to give it some more randomness, let's set the randomize to a value of 0.8. Now they should follow the smoke and fire and have a lot more randomness going all over. You want to add some collision to the logs here, what you can do is select one of them. Going over to the physics tab, you can select collision. We're going to leave all of the values at zero so they don't have any friction or dampening. They just bounce off the logs, and we'll do the same thing for the other objects. With all of them selected, I'll hold the Alt key collision, and that's basically all we really need to do. Jumping back over to the particle system tab, let's create an object to actually be the particles, and we can do that by hitting Shift A, going over to mesh, and then adding in an ICosphere. I'm going to scale the egosphere down just a little bit and drag it over to the left side, then press Control A and apply the scale to it. Then with the circle again selected, we're going to open up the render tab here, set the render as from halo over to object, and then for the instant object, we'll use the eyedropper tool and select the kosphere now you can see them in our scene. Now, the size of them is a bit too big, so we're going to go down to around 0.02 or so. I think that's probably a pretty good size. Then also you can bring up the random size up a bit so they have some different variation. I think that is probably pretty good. Now, one more thing I want to do with this particle system is I want the particles to shrink down over time until they fully disappear around here. Now we can do that pretty easily by adding in a new texture. So over here in texture tab, we'll create a new one. Then jumping over to the texture panel right here we'll set the type from image or movie over to Blent. So it goes from black to white. But at the moment, this is actually inverted. We want the white to be at the start and the black to be over here. What we can do is come down here and open up the color ramp and then just flip this right here. The black is on the right, and then the white is on the left here. Then if you want the transition to be less smooth, we can drag this up a bit so they shrink down a bit quicker about halfway up, right about there. Now, the other thing that we want to do is change the coordinates from generated over to strand particle. Then underneath the influence tab, we don't want to influence the time. We want to influence the size right here. Now if we restart the animation and play it, we'll zoom in, we should be able to see those particles shrink down once it reaches a certain point in the timeline. You can see here they are shrinking down into nothing, which is exactly what I want. With that done, I think we are ready to bake this in. If we open up the cache tab, we'll go ahead and restart, save our project, and then click on Bk. 37. Creating a Campfire Simulation P3 Materials: Now that all of the simulations are done, we can go ahead and start working on the materials and lighting to render out our simulation. The other thing though, with this circle selected, make sure you turn off show emitter so the circles does not show up in the render, but the particles still do. With that being said, let's separate a couple of these different objects into collections, and then we're going to instance that collection. The reason we're doing this is because this campfire right here, if I just add in a new cube, scale it up to be about the size of the campfire, we're going to see that the dimensions is very large. It's almost 2.5 meters big. This is not very accurate to the rural world. So what we're going to do is come over here, right click and create a new collection. All of the objects that don't need to be in the campfire collection to this new collection, that wind force field, the fluid flow we don't really need to instance, the icosphere we're going to add to that collection. So it's just the rocks, the circle, and the empty and all of that. With that done, we can go ahead and hide that collection right there. Then we're going to press Shift A and add in a collection instance and select campfire. With this collection instance, we can scale it down and move it anywhere we want, and it's still going to have that fire simulation and the particle simulation. So what I'll do is I'll just add in a reference cube here. We're going to go into the properties by hitting N, and for the size of this, let's go down to half a meter. Then with the campfire instant selected, scale this down until it's about that size that we want. So right about there, and this is about the average size of a campfire. Something like that will be perfectly fine. Then we can go ahead and delete that cube. For the ground plane, I'm just going to add in a plane object. Make sure it's below all of the rocks, and then we'll just scale it up and scale it along the X axis. I'm going to position my camera in the front view right about here. Then I'm going to press Shift A and add in a new camera object, and then we'll snap the camera to exactly where we're looking by hitting Control, Alt Numpad zero, and then you can press G, middle mouse button, and place the camera how you want. Right about there is probably pretty good. Now for the lighting in the scene, we're going to go over to the world settings and add in an HDR. Underneath the color option, let's add environment texture. Click on Open. And if you want to use the same HDR I'm using, you can find the link in the resources. It's over on Polyhaven. The one we'll be using is this one right here, the lopenhei 04. Go ahead and open that in. For the strength of this, we're going to go down to around a value of 0.1, so everything is pretty dark. And then over in the render tab, we can open up the film option and turn on transparency so the background does not show up. All of that done, we can go ahead and start working on the materials for our fire and our particle. Come up to the top right corner and split this view, and then we're going to switch this over to the shader editor. Now, in order to change the material, we will need to select the original domain. I'm going to go ahead and open this collection back up, select the cube, and then we'll create a new material here. Now, in order for this to stay here without having the cube selected, we can go ahead and pin this window here and then we can hide the campfire scene. Now we're still working on there domain material, but we no longer see that in the viewport. Go ahead and delete the principled shader. We're going to press Shift A, add in a shader, and then a principled volume shader. Take the volume and plug it into the material output. Come on over to the left side here, we're going to press Shift A and add an input and then an attribute node. If you want to, you could use the volume info node, but what I'm going to do is use the heat attribute. For that, we're going to need this node here. If you type in the word heat, we can then take the factor and plug it into the emission strength. Let's go through the timeline a bit to bring our simulation in. There we go. We can now see our fire, but the colors and brightness is not that good at the moment. So between the heat attribute and the principled volume, let's press Shift A, add in a color ramp. Then again, we're going to add in a converter math node, switch the type over to multiply. Then with this multiply node, let's go all the way up to around 200. That's going to give us a much brighter simulation here. Now, in order to get that really nice detail in the fire, we're going to drag the black handle closer somewhere around here. Then we're going to add in a new handle right in the middle. This handle is going to be set all the way to white, and then the far right side handle, we're going to drag this all the way down to black. That's going to give us a lot of interesting detail in our flame here. You can see if this is all the way at white, we don't have that extra detail, but if we are going to drag this side to black, we get all of that flame detail which looks pretty good. Then from here, you can play around with this color ramp until you get the desired look. Probably around there is pretty good. Now in order to get that flame color, let's add in a new color ramp. Take the factor, plug it into the bottom input, then the color is going to go into the emission color here. We're going to add in a new handle, drag this to the right and then this is going to be that red color. You can play around with the position of this handle until you get the desired amount of red in your scene, probably a little bit more orange actually. Then for the white handle, we're going to switch this over to a yellowish color. Something like that will be pretty good. Maybe the brightness, we can go up to around 250. I think that will look pretty nice. Then for the density here, let's go up to around 40. Maybe let's go 50 actually to get some nice smoke in the scene. That is looking pretty good. You can zoom out and make sure that the brightness is as much as you want. If you want to go even higher, you could go up higher. Let's try 500. I think that actually looks pretty good. That's basically all we really need to do for this material. For the particle material, we can go ahead and select the icosphere right here, uncheck that pin, and then create a new material. We're going to delete the principle shader and then press Shift A, add in a shader and emission shader. Take the emission and plug it into the surface of the material output. If we zoom in now, we should be able to see those particles, as you can see there. We're going to set the strength of this up to around ten, so they're nice and bright. Then for the color, we're going to have the particle change color over time. In order for that to happen, we're going to add in a new node. It's going to be input and then a particle info node right here. What we need to do is take the age and lifetime and divide those two values, and that's going to give us that gradient over the lifetime of the particle. We'll add in a new converter math node, take the age, plug it into the top input, the lifetime into the bottom input, and then we'll set this over to divide. Then we'll use a color ramp to determine the color. Add in a new color ramp, take the value, plug it into the bottom input, then the color is going to go into the emission shader here. This left side is where the particle begins. We're going to drag this up a bit and switch it over to a nice bright yellowish color, something like this or so, maybe a bit more orange, actually. And then for the end of the lifetime, where the particle disappears, I want it to be more of a reddish color. So something like that will look pretty good. And there we go. I think that is looking really nice. Those particles change. And if we go up to the top here, it might be a bit hard to see, but they are starting to change that color. And if you were to drag this over, you're going to see that color of that particle change even more. Probably somewhere around there is perfect. With that done, we can go ahead and close off this panel. We're not going to need it anymore. Jumping over to the render tab, let's change the max samples here down to around 50. Open up the denoise and make sure we're using the GPU for the denoise. We're also going to enable motion blur, and for the shutter amount, this is the amount of motion blur that's going to be in the scene. Let's go up to around 0.8. Now, keep in mind this will affect the flame here, but since we set the velocity scale of our domain a lot lower, it shouldn't give it too much of an effect. This value here is mostly for the particles that are flying outwards. So with that done, let's do a quick render right here by hitting F 12. And once this is done rendering, we're going to jump over to the compositor and then add in a background and glare to the flames. All right, the render has finished, and we can see here that the motion blur is giving the sparks a really nice look. The flame is also looking pretty good with the velocity scale. Next, let's go over to the compositing workspace at the top here, select use nodes. I'm going to go ahead and close off this bottom window and you can press V a couple times to Zoom outwards. First off, we're going to press Shift A, add in a filter, and then a glare node. We'll place that here. So it's the type over to fog glow. And then for the strength, I might go down to around 0.8 or 0.7, and then the size maybe drag that down just a bit because I think it's a bit too strong here. For the background, let's press Shift A, add in a mix, and then a Alpha over node. We'll place this right here. Make sure the image is in the bottom input, and now this top image controls the background. We're just going to go to more of a black or very dark gray color, something like that. And with that done, we can go ahead and save this project. We'll jump back over to the layout tab, and then in the output, what we're going to do is set an output and render this as an image sequence. This is actually the proper way to render animations in blender. In the previous tutorials, we were using EV and it renders pretty quickly. That is why I skip that step. But since we're rendering in cycles and this will take a lot longer, we're going to render it as an image sequence. To do this, over in the output tab, set a new directory of where you want your animation to go to. Going to place it in this folder and then click except. We'll leave the format at PNG. Then you can go ahead and save your project and then come up to render and then select Render Animation. Once the render has finished, we'll jump over to the video sequence editor and then combine them into a movie file. 38. Creating a Campfire Simulation P4 Sequencing: Now that the render is done, let's go ahead and sequence all of the frames into a movie file. To do this, go ahead and exit out of the rendered view and then over in the output tab, you can switch the file format from P&G over to a movie file. Underneath the encoding option here, we're going to select the container and switch it over to MP four, or you could use any of the file types that you would like. For the output quality, we're going to switch it to high. Then over in the top right here, we're going to hit that plus sign and switch to the video editing workspace. First, we're going to make sure that the cursor is on frame one and then go over to the Ad menu, select image sequence, navigate to where your frames are MNR right here. We're going to press A to select everything, and again, make sure this is set by sort by name and not modified date or it's going to play backwards. Then go ahead and select Add Image strip. We can go ahead and play through this and see what our flame looks like. It's looking pretty good. All we have to do is just double check that the color management down here, it's set to standard. If this is set to filmic, it's going to change what the frames look like. So make sure standard and then look is set to none. If you wanted to add more contrast, you could do that, but this is on top of the contrast that was already added. You can see like that, that's way too much. I'm just going to leave it on none. From here, go up to render and then select Render Animation once again. This will then sequence all of those frames into a movie file and place it in the output directory. But there we go. That is how we create a campfire scene in Blender. Thank you very much for watching all the way to the end of this tutorial, and if you created something, feel free to post it in the assignment or post it on Instagram and tag me at Blender Made Easy. In the next section, we're going to be working on creating a big explosion. 39. Missile Explosion P1 Curve Animation: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new section. In this one, we're going to be creating this Missile simulation. We're going to be covering a big variety of topics, including particle systems, working with multiple domains, adding curves, and following curves. We're going to be covering all that in this section. To get started, make sure you open up the resources and download this Missile model because this is what we're going to be using for the explosion. Once you have it downloaded, go ahead and open it up and then hit Control C to copy this model with it selected. Then we're going to jump over to a brand new scene, delete the default cube, and press Control V to paste in that missile model. There we go. Now let's go ahead and animate it following a curve and colliding with the ground. I'm going to hit Shift A, we'll first add that ground plane, add in a plane. Scale it up a bit, somewhere around there is good. Now, there are two ways we can animate this. Number one, we could select our model, rotate it and place it up here, and then just animate the location coming down. But it's a little bit hard to work with and we don't really have a lot of control over the path of the missile. Instead, what I like to do is add in a curve and have it follow the curve. Can do this by adding a curve, we'll press Shift A, go over to curve, and then select Bezier curve. In top view, I'm going to go into wireframe. Then in edit mode, let's rotate this so we have a flat line just like this. You can hold Control and snap it to right there is pretty good. Go back into front view and then in Edit mode again, I'm going to place this side right at the start here, rotate it up a bit, and place it right where we want the missile to land. Then we'll select the other handle, drag it up this way, scale it up somewhere around here is probably pretty good, about seven grid units up. Now, you could, if you wanted to add in some different variation in this curve, you could have it go like this and then go straight down. You can do whatever shape that you want for our missile. I think I'm just going to have this effect where it starts here and just has a gradual curve. Jumping over to the curve settings, let's set the resolution up a bit because right now, if we zoom in, you're going to see that this is a little bit low poly. You can see the individual points. Let's set the resolution here to 32, and that's going to give us a much smoother curve. Now, to have the missile actually follow it, let's go ahead and select it. Then over in the constraints tab, we're going to add in a new constraint, select follow path, and then for the target, choose the bezier curve that we just added. If we were to bring up the offset, now you can see it's actually moving along the curve. Want to do though is I'm going to turn on fixed position and also follow curve. The follow curve allows the missile to be rotated along the curve as you can see here. Now at the moment, the rotation is incorrect. We actually need it to rotate looking down. What I'll do is go into Edit mode, press R, then X, and if you hit X again, you can lock it towards the normal and then we're going to go negative 90 and Enter. Now you can see it's pointed upwards, but that's also because the direction of our curve is going up instead of down. If we were to drag this up now, you can see it's following it. Let's go ahead and flip the direction so it starts out at the top and then comes down. With the curve selected in edit mode, press A to select everything, right click and then we're going to choose switch direction right here. Once we do that, you're going to see the missile is now at the top here and now if we were to select it, bring up the offset factor, you can see it's going to go down the curve. Now, one other small issue is the origin point is not at the center. Let's go ahead and fix that in edit mode. I'm just going to drag this missile down until it's right about there. Something like that is perfect. Now if we drag this up, you're going to see this effect. For the animation here on frame one, I'm going to add in a keyframe to the offset factor. Then we're going to jump over to frame 20 right here, bring the offset factor all the way up. Now, if you want the missile to be deeper into the ground, you could bring this up to 1.1. That's a bit too high, but you can see it's much further down. I'm going to go somewhere around here or so and then add in another keyframe. Let's go ahead and restart the animation and play this to see what it looks like. That is looking pretty good. But you're going to notice one small issue. You're going to see it starts out a bit slow and in the middle, it goes really fast and then right at the end, it slows down. Now the reason that's happening is because the animation between these two keyframes is a smooth curve and we can fix that by selecting both of them, hitting T, and then choose linear. Now it should move at a constant rate and that looks pretty good. 40. Missile Explosion P2 Particles: Now that we have the animation working properly here in blender, let's actually create the explosion effect. Now, creating explosions in Blender is actually not too bad, there are two different ways we can do this. Number one is using a mesh object. Number two is using a particle system. With a mesh object, it gives you a lot more control over the look of the explosion, but you're going to have to do a lot of modeling to get the exact look that you want and sometimes it doesn't really look that great. Particle systems, it is a little bit harder to get the look that you're wanting, but it's easier to work with and it gives you a lot more randomness in your explosion. See different animations on screen of the different simulations that I've been working on while I was testing for this tutorial, I found that I like working with particle systems a lot more. That's what we're going to do in this video. To start out with, we're going to add in a new object. We'll press Shift A, go over to mesh, and then add in a UV sphere. In Edit mode, I'm going to select half of the UV sphere, actually a little bit more than half, press X, and then delete the vertices. Then I'm going to hit A and drag this back down to the origin point and scale this down a bit pretty small, something like that. The other thing I want to do is give some more randomness to this UV sphere. We're going to jump over to the modifier tab, add in a new modifier, deform, and then select displace right here. Create a new texture, and then over in the texture panel, we're going to switch the type from image or movie over to clouds. Here, this gives us a lot more randomness on our object and that will allow the particles to shoot out in a lot more random directions. Over here in the size, you can play around with this until you get the look that you want. You can also press Control A and apply D scale to it since we scaled it pretty down. Once we've done that, we will need to change the size a bit. Let's go down until we get the look that we want somewhere around there. Then for the strength of this, we need to go much lower to round 0.1 or so. I think that is pretty good. Then we can jump back over to the size, drag it down even further. We go. I think that is looking good. Now for the actual particle system, we're going to jump over to the particle system tab, create a new one, right at the moment, our particles are very large in the viewport. The first thing that we'll do just to be able to see everything a lot easier is we're going to open up the viewport display and bring the size of them much lower, something like that. Now we can actually see our mesh, and it's going to be a lot easier to work with. Starting out at the very top, here we have the number of particles that are going to shoot out in all directions. Now, the higher you go with this, the more smoke and fire will blow out of your particles. I found that a value of around 5,000 to around 8,000 looks pretty good. We're going to go with 7,000 for this first particle system. The start frame is when we're going to want our explosion to happen. Now with our animation, I want the missile to come down, hang out there for a little bit, and then explode on frame 50. For the start frame, we're going to go up to 50 and then for the end frame, let's go with 60. And then for the end frame, let's go with 56. So over the course of six frames, all 7,000 particles are going to be emitted. The lifetime here controls the lifetime of the particles. We only want the particles to last for a very short amount of time. We're going to go down to around five frames. So now if we plan our animation, here is the effect that we get. Now at the moment, it's still not looking that great and that's because there is no velocity. They're just being emitted and falling straight down. The first thing that we'll do is we're going to open up the velocity tab, set the normal amount up to three. This will allow the normals on our mesh to have more velocity in the direction. They're going to shoot out here, shoot out here, and it's going to look a lot better. The other thing that we're going to do is bring up the Z direction, the Z velocity. Let's go up to a value up two. Now they're going to shoot out along the normal, but they're also going to be shooting upwards. Then for the randomized here, let's go up to 1.2. Actually, before I do that, I'm going to show you exactly what that does. If we now play our animation, you're going to see this effect. Now this is looking better, but we have these trails of particles and that doesn't really look that good. If we're going to simulate that, you're going to have trails of smoke and it's not going to look good. That is where the randomized comes in. If we bring this up to 1.2, now when we play the animation, this looks much better, and this is going to give us a much better explosion. The other thing I'm going to do is come down here to the field weights and just turn gravity all the way off. Just in case it has some effect on the particle movement, I don't want gravity to bring the particles down and there you go. You can see that looks a lot better. Our particles are looking pretty good so far, but if we were to add in the smoke simulation to this, it's going to be one single dome of smoke and it's not going to look that dynamic. Let's add in a couple more objects with more particles to create a much more interesting shape for our explosion. We'll press Shift A and add in an icosphere, scale this icosphere down and then just place it right about here slightly above our UV sphere, then hit Control A, and then apply the scale. Over in the particle system tab, we're going to create a new one and then in the drop down menu, select the one that we just created and then duplicate it right there. Now if we change any of these settings, it's not going to affect the original one. The first thing that we'll do is set the number a bit lower. Let's go with around 5,000. Then for the start frame, let's give this some slight variation as well. Let's go up to 51 and then for the end frame, let's go with 57. The lifetime here, we can go up slightly higher. Let's go with six, and then for the velocity, let's actually drag this over to the right side so we can see what we're doing. We play our animation right now, here is the effect that we're getting. You can see they're kind of all flying out in all directions. This is not really what I want. I more want it to shoot off in the Z direction. So what we'll do is over on the right side, let's set the normal amount to two and then the Z, let's go up to around four. And then for the randomized, let's go down till around 0.3. So here is the effect now, and this is more of the shape that I want. Maybe we'll bring the randomized up slightly higher till around 0.5. And that is looking pretty good. What we can do now is bring this back over to our original location, and then we're going to rotate this so that the particles are shooting off in this direction. So I'm going to place my cursor right at the center at the top and then rotate it, and then we'll go right about there is good. Now, let's play our animation and see what it looks like. There we go. That is going to look a lot better once we add in the smoke simulation. Going to do this one more time with this UV sphere, I'm going to hit Shift D to duplicate it. Come up here, make sure you duplicate the particle system as well. We'll set the start frame back to 50 and then for the end frame, let's go with 55. The lifetime will go down to five as well. Down here, I'm going to set the normal amount to 1.5. Then the Z direction, let's go down as well till around 3.5, and then the randomize will go down to 0.2. Just some slight variation in our explosion. Let's also rotate this so it's shooting off in this direction and we'll see what this looks like. That looks pretty good. Let's drag this back over here and then one more particle system that we're going to be adding is a circle and it's going to be shooting off in this direction and it's actually going to hit the floor. With our plane selected, let's add collision to this. Over in the physics tab, enable collision, and then we'll bring up the dampening all the way up to a value of one. Will allow the particles to not bounce on it, but just slide across the plane here. Then in front view, we'll add in a new mesh object circle. In Edit mode, I'm going to hit F to fill in a face. Then scale this down, drag it up. We'll rotate this 90 degrees. Then in the top view, let's also rotate it this way, so it's going to shoot out in this direction. Actually, you hit Control A and apply the scale and then over in the physics in the particle system tab, we'll create a new one and then we'll select the one that we just created, which I think is this one here. The one with 5,050 and then 55. Let's take a look at this particle system. We'll drag this over to the left and we'll play it. That is not really what I want. I want it to be a lot more random. Let's first duplicate the particle system. We'll set the randomized up till around 1.5. We'll see what that looks like. That looks a little bit better. Let's go up even higher till around 2.5. O. That is looking pretty good. I like that. Let's position it back over to the start here, right about there. Now let's take a look at our entire particle system setup. That looks pretty good. The circle particle system might be shooting out a bit too far. Let's bring the Z back down until around two, and that is looking pretty good. Once we add in the smoke simulation, we're going to have a much more dynamic looking explosion with all these particles shooting off in multiple directions. 41. Missile Explosion P3 Simulation: Now that we have all of the particles working properly, let's create the smoke simulation. Let's press Shift A. We're going to add in a cube object. This is going to be our domain. Go into front view and then Etiode. I'm just going to drag this up until it's right there sitting on the grid floor. Now if we scale it up, it's going to be scaled right on that origin point. For the dimensions here, let's set the Z up till around five, it's pretty tall. Then for the X direction, let's go up till around ten. The Y direction will go with, let's say eight or so. We have this big domain that we can work with just like that. Let's play our animation and make sure the particles are in the correct position. It does look like we could scale this down slightly, but we want to make sure we have extra room for the particle and smoke to fly off in both directions. Somewhere around there is good. Then we'll hit Control A and then apply the scale. Over in the physics tab, let's create a new fluid domain here by selecting the type, switching it to domain. Before we change anything else, let's come down here to the type. We'll change it over to so we can bake this in later and then turn on is resumable. Other thing that we're going to do is set a custom folder for this cache. Since we're going to be working with two different domains, we want to make sure they don't override each other. So we're going to set two custom folders. And the reason we're working with two different domains is because the settings for our explosion are going to be different from the settings for our missile trail here. So click on the button on the side here. We're going to open up this folder and then create a new folder. We'll call this cache one, and then we'll place all of our information data right here in this folder. The end frame here, we're going to go down to 125. We don't really need that many frames for our explosion. Now let's go back up to the top here and start working through all of the settings. First off, the resolution divisions, we're going to go up to 196. I found that this looks pretty good for our simulation here. Underneath the border collisions, make sure the bottom is turned on. Then also turn on adaptive domain, which will allow the simulation to bake a lot faster. We're going to turn on noise right here, if you want to bring up the uprest factor up t three, you could do that. That's going to give you a lot of detail, but I think a value of two is perfectly fine for this simulation. The other thing that we're going to want to do is bring the reaction speed much lower. The fire seems to dissipate a lot quicker with our explosion with our particles, so we're going to have the fire last a lot longer by changing the reaction speed. Let's go down to 0.3. Now let's work on our flow objects. I'm going to zoom in here and select all of them. D select the curve right there with this first one selected, now before you add this in, make sure you're holding the Alt key and then select fluid, set the type over to flow, and then for the flow type, holding Alt still, we're going to go with fire and smoke and then for the flow behavior, switch it over to inflow. If you held Alt that entire time, if we selected these ones, you're going to see it has all those exact same settings. That is one trick that you can do. If you hold the Alt key with multiple objects selected, you can change a setting and it's going to change it for all of them. So continuing on, I'm going to hold the Alt key, bring the sampling substeps up till around ten or so. Then holding Alt, I'm going to set the flow source from mesh over to particle system, and then for the particle system, select the one that we just created right there. Turn on initial velocity and for the source value, let's go up till around five. Now, if you hold Alt that entire time, you should be able to see that all of those settings are there. One thing though that I've noticed sometimes this happens is if we held the Alt key for the particle system here, sometimes it doesn't really work properly and it doesn't actually animate the flow correctly. So one way we can fix that is just deleting that and then adding it back in. We can do this for all of them just to make sure it's using the correct particle system. I don't know why that happens. It might be fixed in the version of blender that you're using, but just in case I like to come through here and redo all of those particle systems. Other thing I'm going to change is with the icospheres here, I'm going to bring the source value slightly lower till around four. Then for the circle right here, I'm going to bring this even lower until around three. Since these icospheres are shooting off in a single direction, with a higher source value, the smoke is going to fly a lot further. So bringing that a bit lower will help counteract that. With all of that done, we can go ahead and save our project and then we can bake this in. With our domain selected, save your project one more time, scroll down to the bottom here, and then click on Bake A. 42. Missile Explosion P4 Missile Trail: Alright, the bake has finished, and let's go ahead and scroll through here and see what our explosion looks like. And that is looking pretty good. Not too bad at all. Now for the next step in this tutorial, let's work on the missile trail smoke simulation. First, though, we're going to go into the front view here. I'm going to select the missile and then press M and move it to its own collection. We'll call this missile and then we'll create that new collection. We want to make sure when we add that new domain that it's not going to be using the particle systems, and we're going to be doing that very easily with the collections tab right here in this new domain object. So I'm going to hit Shift A. We'll add in a new cube. In edit mode, I'm going to bring this up and then scale this up and just make it about the same size as the trail of smoke here. We'll drag it this way. We about there is good, something like this. Then in the front view, I might scale it along the Y just slightly so we get this shape for our new domain. Again, make sure you drag this into the missile collection. Press Control A and apply the scale to this domain, and then we're going to add in a fluid, switch the type over to domain. Scroll down here until we get to the cache and make sure we set a new directory here. I'm going to go back. In our folder right here, I'm going to create a new one. I'm going to call it cache two, and then I'll place all of the information right here in this new folder. The end frame, I'm going to match our end frame for our other simulation, which is 120. Then for the type, we're just going to switch it to modular. We don't really need to use all because we're not going to be using a noise for this simulation. Now, before we work on all of these settings, let's work on the missile object itself here. I'm going to zoom in on it by hitting period and we want to make sure it's only emitting from the very back here and then shooting out the fire and smoke in this direction. Now we can do this by adding in a new vertex group. In edit mode, we're going to select this face on the back here. Jump over to the data panel right here and then create a new vertex group. With the weight set to one, we're going to assign this new face with a weight of one to this new group. Now if we switch over to the weight paint mode, we should be able to see, there you go. You can see all of the red is right there on that face. Now what we can do is jump back over to the physics tab, select fluid, switch the type over to flow. For the flow type, let's go with fire and smoke and then for the flow behavior. We're going to switch it over to inflow. These sampling stubsps let's go again up until around ten, and then for the vertex group, make sure we select that group right here. This will allow only this face now to emit fire and smoke into the domain. The other thing that we're going to do is turn on initial velocity and with a normal rocket, there is constant fire and smoke being thrown out the back right here. Now we can do that by setting the normal amount up till around 50 here. Wherever the normal is pointing on our face here, it's going to be shooting out in that direction. For example, if it's right here, it's going to be shooting out in this direction and then as it goes down, it's going to rotate and then shoot off in this direction, which is exactly what we want. The other thing that we're going to do is animate this use flow right when it collides with the ground. On frame 50, I want the smoke and fire to turn off. Here we're going to add in a keyframe to the use flow, jump to the next frame and then turn this off and then add in another keyframe here. And that's basically all we really need to do for our flow object. As for the domain set ins, go ahead and select it. We'll come down here to the collections and make sure the flow collection is set to the missile one. So it's not going to use the particle system and all of these other particles that we created here. It's only going to be using the flow objects in this missile collection. So jumping back over here to the top, we're going to set the resolution divisions up a bit higher with 256. We're going to turn on the bottom border collision just in case some of the smoke collides with it. We're going to turn on adaptive domain. Underneath the gas setting, let's set both of these values down till around 0.7, just so the smoke doesn't rise as fast. And then we don't need to dissolve, so we're going to go ahead and leave that off. For the reaction speed, though, we're going to go much higher to 2.5. Will allow the fire to dissipate a lot faster because at the moment with a value of 0.75, the fire is going to be way over here as it's going down our trail here and we want it to stop right about here or so. Having it at 2.5 will allow it to dissipate right here. Now, there is one more thing that we need to add to this simulation. If we were to simulate it as it is, it would still look pretty good. But there's one key factor that's going to be missing from this simulation, and that is the explosion force from our first domain. If we play this here, you can imagine that the force of the explosion will make all of the smoke here all along this fly out in all directions because of the explosion happening. Now we can do that effect by adding in a force field and then animating the strength of it right when the explosion happens. I'm going to hit Shift A and add in a force field and then select force right here. Hit Alt G to snap it to the center here, we'll drag it up slightly so it's right in the middle of our explosion. Now, one thing that we want to do is limit the explosion and shock wave effect from a certain distance, and we can do that with the fall off option. I'm going to turn on the minimum and maximum. The minimum is going to set to one, and then the maximum, let's go up till four. With 1 meter, this is going to have a full force field effect and it's going to slowly dissipate from the strength value. We're actually going to bring up to four. F four all the way to the end right here, it's going to go 4-0. For the strength here, we want to make sure it only happens when the explosion actually happens. So on frame, let's go with 51 or so. We're going to set the strength down to zero and then add in a keyframe. Then for the next frame, 52, let's go up till around four and then add in another keyframe here. So all of the smoke that is caught right in the middle and all the way up till around here is going to be blown off to the side, which will look a lot more realistic. Again, make sure we drag this force into the missile collection. One more setting that we're going to change is with the missile object. I'm going to bring the source value here with the initial velocity down to zero. With it set to one, when it hits the ground, some of the smoke is actually going to fly off and go inside the model which I don't really want. I'm just going to bring the source to zero and that should fix our issue. I'm going to go ahead and save my project one more time and then click on Bake Data. 43. Missile Explosion P5 Smoke Materials: The simulation has finished baking, so let's go ahead and check it out. If we play our simulation, I'll go into front view and to see exactly what this looks like. Not too bad. Then when the explosion happens on frame 50, all of the smoke gets pushed off to the side when the force field turns on, and that is looking pretty good. Now in this video, we're going to be working on the lighting and materials. First off, for the lighting, I'm going to jump over to the world settings here and use an environment texture. We'll click on the yellow button there, select environment texture, if you want to use the same one I'm using, you can find the link over in the resources. It's over on Ply haven and it's this one right here, the dry field four K. Go ahead and open that in. Now let's go into the rendered view and see what this looks like. Now at the moment, we don't have any materials on our two domains, and that's why they are cubes. What we're going to be doing though in this video is going over to the cycles render engine. I found that cycles looks a lot better than EV, so we're going to go ahead and switch over. Select your plane and we'll scale it up a little bit to make it a bit bigger, then I'm also going to select lamp or default lamp here. We don't really need that in our scene, let's go ahead and delete it. Background, I'm going to go into Edit Mode, select this edge here over in Ed select mode, and then just extrude this up so we get a plain background. Then to smooth it out, I'm going to select that corner, Control B to bevel, and then use the scroll wheel to add in more vertices. Something like that will look pretty good. Now we have a nice smooth background. I'm going to position the camera right about here or so so we get the whole simulation in the view, and then I'm going to hit Control Alt Numpad zero to snap the camera to place, or you can go up to view down to a line view right here and then select a line active camera to view. Select your camera and zoom outwards until we get the full frame. Now, I'm going to jump over to the end frame, 125 just to make sure that we have the whole thing in view. I might zoom in a little bit and place it right about there so we don't see that cut off. Something like that is good. Now for the material, let's select our first domain, and then we'll come up to the top window, split this view, and then switch it over to the shader editor. You could go over to the shading workspace, but I prefer the vertical node workspace right here rather than the horizontal one. We'll go back into the neared view and toggle overlays, and then we'll create a new material. We don't need the principled shader, so go ahead and delete that and then press Shift A, we'll go over to Shader and then select principled volume. Take the volume and plug it into the volume of the material output. To bring in our flame, we'll press Shift A, go over to input, and then add in a volume infode right here and we're going to be using the flame attribute. We'll press Shift A and add in a color ramp to control this a bit more. We'll take the flame, plug it into the bottom input, and then the color is going to go into the emission strength. Now to control this a bit more, we'll add in a math node, switch the type over to multiply. For the bottom value, let's go with a value of 250. This is going to give us a much brighter flame. Now, I might drag the black handle a bit closer to clamp down on some of the flame value. I think that will look a bit better. Now for the density, I'm going to control shift D on both of these, Control Shift D. This time we're going to take the density, plug this in, then the value is going to go into the density of the principal volume. Now at the moment, the strength is way too high, let's go down to 25. Then the other thing I'm going to do is bring the black handle all the way to the left and then the white handle, I'm also going to drag a bit closer. If we jump to frame 120 or so right about here, you're going to see the effect that we get. If this is all the way at zero, the edges of our smoke is very light and wispy and not that sharp. If we were to drag the white handle a bit closer, it's going to clamp down on some of those edges and give us a much better result. Something like that will look pretty good. For the color of the smoke, if you want it to be more of a lighter color, you can drag this up or if you want a darker, more explosion looking color, you can drag it down. I might drag it down just slightly so we get that look. Now for the color of the flames, let's jump back over to frame 60 or so. Then I'm going to select the color ramp control shift D to duplicate it. Take the color and plug it into the emission color. We'll add in a new handle and for this handle, it's going to be a reddish color. Then for the white handle, this is going to be more of a yellowish color. Somewhere around here will look pretty good. The other thing I'm going to do is over in the render tab underneath the color management. I want to set the look to high contrast and then for the view transform, I want to use filmic to bring more of that saturated color in. I might bring the yellow a bit less saturated. Something like that will look pretty good. Then we'll jump to a little bit later frame 80 just to double check how this looks. Yeah, there we go. That's looking pretty good. If you want more dense smoke, you can turn up this multiply node, or if you want the fire to be brighter, you could go higher with this value like 500. That's going to give a very bright flame. But I think a value of 250 is perfectly fine. As for the other smoke, go ahead and select your trail domain here. We'll use that same material right here, the normal material, and then make sure you duplicate it so it doesn't affect the original one. Now let's jump to frame 20 or 19 or so, somewhere around here. Actually, that is looking pretty good so far. I might drag this a bit closer and then for the value here, let's go up to 50. There we go. Now we have a dense smoke trail and then for the color, I'm actually going to go much brighter all the way to white. To control the flame, if you want it to be a bit shorter, you can drag this value, this black handle a bit closer to the right side, and that's going to clamp down on that fire trail. And then if you wanted to bring back that color, you can drag this orange handle a bit closer to the right as well. Something like that will look pretty good. For the material for the plane, go ahead and select your plane. We'll give it a new material, and then I might just bring the roughness down slightly so we get a nice glossy look, and I think that will look pretty good. If now we jump to frame 60 or so, we're going to get some nice reflections in the bottom of the plane. 44. Missile Explosion P6 Render Settings: Now that all of the materials are done, let's work on some render settings and then we'll finally render out our full animation. First off, we're going to jump over to the first frame, and I want to make sure all of these objects are hidden from the viewport. Over on the outliner here, make sure they're hidden from the view and from the render, and then for the icospheres, we'll also hide those objects and then finally the circle, make sure that is also hidden from the render. The thing that we're going to want to do is jump over to frame like 55 or so, maybe a little bit more than that. We're going to make sure that the missile here also disappears when the explosion happens. Find a frame that looks good that the missile is hidden and that looks pretty good. We're going to go ahead and use this frame on 58. Hover your mouse over the render icon for the missile and then hit I to add in a keyframe and then go one frame later. We're going to turn it off and then add in another keyframe so that missile disappears. And now when the animation plays and then it's revealed later, there's not going to be a missile shown up there in the rendered view. The other thing that you might notice if we go into the rendered view is we get some random blotches of shadow here, there's a blotch there, a little spot there and a couple here. Now we can bump up those transparency rays by opening up the light paths. Underneath the transparency right here, we're going to bring this all the way up until around 32. And once we do that, now you can see those shadows are gone. Over here, those shadows are also gone. Up here at the top, let's set the render samples down to 50 or so. I think that will give us plenty of samples to work with. And then underneath the denoise, I'm going to make sure my use GPU is enabled for the denoise right here. Let's go ahead and do a render on frame 65 or so. Something like this, this will look pretty good. Let's go ahead and hit F 12 to render out an image. Once the render is done, we're going to be adding in some glare over in the compositor. The render is done and I'm going to hit Escape to exit out of the rendered view and then jump over to the compositing workspace. Select use nodes, and then with this node, we're going to go ahead and close off this bottom window here by dragging down, and then you can hit V a couple times to Zoom out. I'm going to press Shift A and add an A filter and then glare and place that right here and then switch it from streaks over to fog glow. With the fog glow, we can bring the strength down a bit because I think it's a bit too strong, the size down slightly right about there. If you wanted to give it some tint, you could go with an orange or yellowish color. Somewhere around here will probably look pretty good. Now we are ready to do a final render, so I'm going to go ahead and save my project one more time over in the layout tab, we'll jump over to the output and then set a custom folder of where we want our animation to go to. We will be rendering this as an image sequence because this is going to take a lot longer than EV, and then we're going to sequence it out later. Just in case blender crashes, it's really important that we render it as sequence. The button on the side and navigate to a new folder. Create a new folder here and then select it, and then we'll place it in this folder. Go ahead and click except. The end frame in the timeline, let's match our end frame of our simulation with 125. I think that is all we really need to do. I'm just going to double check everything is good. I think so. Yeah, we're good to go, save your project and then go up to render and then select Render Animation. Now, since we already covered how to sequence all of your frames into a movie file, I'm going to go ahead and skip that for this tutorial. If you want a refresher of how to do that, you can jump over to the campfire section and view the last video in that section. But there we go. That is the final result of our explosion simulation. If you created something from this section, I would love to see it, so feel free to send it to me on social media at Blender Made Easy. 45. Glowing Smoke P1 Flow Object Animation: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new section. In this one, we're going to be creating this spherical smoke simulation. We're going to be animating the flow object inside and having it collide with the edges of the sphere. The main goal of this project is to show how to simulate smoke and fire inside collision objects. To get started, let's add in all of the objects that we're going to need for the scene. With this default cube, this is going to be our domain object. Let's scale it up by going into the properties tab by pressing N. We're going to set the dimensions up to a value of three. Then for our collision object, let's press Shift A and then add in an kosphere. Before we do anything else, we want to open up the bottom left panel right here and set the number of subdivisions up til a level of four. Now we have a lot more geometry to work with. Then in front view, I'm going to scale it up to be about the same size as our domain. Somewhere around there is good. Now for our flow object, let's press Shift A, and we're going to be adding in a UV sphere. Scale this UV sphere down to be about the size that you want. Somewhere around there is pretty good. We have all three objects, let's select all of them and then press Control A and then apply the scale to it, so all of the numbers in the properties go back to one. Now before we add in the smoke simulation, let's create the animation of our UV sphere here flying around our collision object. To do this, we're going to be adding in one single keyframe and then applying noise to the location of this object. To do this, press K with it selected and then choose location. Then we're going to open up a new window by coming up to the top right, splitting this view, and then switching this editor over to the graph editor. If we open up this panel right here and then underneath the object transformation, we can see all of the locations of the keyframe that we just added. Now, what we're going to want to do is select the location. Then over on the right side, we're going to switch it to the modifier tab, click Add modifier, and we're going to choose noise. Now at the moment, if we play our animation, this is what it looks like, and this is way too fast and it's jittering way too much. The first thing that we're going to want to do is bring up the scale all the way to ten. This is going to bring out the noise pattern and stretch it out a lot further. Now our movement is going to look like this. Now this is looking better, but we can have the sphere go all the way to the edge of our collision object for that to happen, we need to bring up the strength value. Let's try a value of two first and we'll double check that it doesn't go outside of our collision object. If we play our animation, that looks pretty good. What you can do is find the highest point, which is right here. It looks like we still have a lot of space to work with. Let's go up even further. Let's go to 2.2 or so and then we'll just double check everything else. That looks pretty good. Other thing I want to do is right at the beginning here, I don't want any noise. What I want is for a smooth transition from the very center to where the noise is actually happening, and we can do that with the restrict frame range. Go ahead and check that and then open up this panel. We're going to set the end frame to match the end frame in our timeline and for this simulation in particular, we're going to go with 200 frames, go ahead and set that to 200. Then for the blend N, we're going to go up to a value of around 20. So you can see here if I zoom in now, if I bring this up even further, you're going to see this blend effect, and that's going to give us a nice smooth transition into the noise pattern. Again, I'm going to go back down to 20. If we play our animation and look at the top, you're going to see it's only moving along the X axis. What we'll do now is we're going to copy this modifier and apply it to the other locations. You can copy it by clicking the button on the top right, then selecting the Y location and pasting it in. Now, you will want to change the offset value here because at the moment, you're going to see it's using the exact same noise pattern. With the Y one selected, let's bring up the offset up higher until we get a better noise pattern, something like that. I might go a bit different because I don't really like this length of noise. I want it to be more chaotic. Let's go up until we find a better noise pattern. Something like that will look pretty good. Then we're going to select the Z location, paste it in as well. Then again, we're going to change the offset, maybe go into the negative direction this time. Something like that will look good. Then just go into the front view and double check that it does not exit outside of our collision object. It looks like it doesn't. You can go into top view as well and double check this angle just to make sure that it does not exit the collision object, and that is looking pretty good. One more thing that we're going to do is right at the beginning here. What I want is for this object to scale up and then start moving around. This will allow the simulation to have a seamless loop. To do this, we're going to jump into front view. And then in the properties tab, we're going to set the scale right here down to zero on frame one, and then hit K and then add in a scale keyframe. We're then going to go five frames later, set the scale amount up to 1.1, and then add in another scale keyframe. And then again, five frames later, we're going to go down back to the original scale of exactly one. Hit K and then add in another scale keyframe. Now, here's the effect that we get. You can see right here, it goes out and then it comes back in and that's going to give us that popping out effect. That is one trick that you could do with any sort of animation is you can go past the original value and then a couple of frames later, go back down to the original value, and that'll give you a nice popping out effect. So with that done, we're going to go ahead and start working on the simulation. 46. Glowing Smoke P2 Simulating the Smoke: Now that we have all the objects in the scene, let's start working on the simulation. We're not going to need the graph editor anymore, so come up to the top and then just click and drag to get rid of that window. Now, first off, we're going to work on the collision object. Now with collision objects, there are a couple of things that you're going to need to do for this object to have smoke actually simulate inside of it. First off, let's go into Edit mode with it selected. I'm going to come up to the top right right here and then turn on the normals and then bring up the size slightly. The direction of these blue lines, that is the direction of the normals. This tells us that blender is treating this object as a completely solid mesh. This means that there's going to be no smoke that's going to be able to simulate inside of it. What we're going to need to do is flip the direction of the normals so that they're on the inside and now that's going to tell blender that this object is empty. We can do this by selecting everything and then hit Control Shift N, and that's going to flip the normals. Now if we go inside, now they're pointing towards the inside. Now this is actually a empty object now according to blender. Now that is not all that we need to do for this object. The other thing that we're going to need to do is delete one phase so that there's a small hole on this object and we want to make sure this hole is bigger than the voxel size of our domain object. Now, I don't know if this is just a limitation with lender, but a lot of my testing, I could not get the smoke to simulate properly without a small hole in the object. What we're going to do is go into top view. Let's go ahead and select our domain and press H to hide it just so we can focus on this kosphere. Then in edit mode, I'm just going to select that vertex, press X, and then delete it. Now we have a small hole on our object. Now, the other thing that we're going to want to do is go into front view. I'm going to press Shift A. Actually, first, make sure the cursor is at the center and I'm going to press Shift C to snap the cursor towards the center, and we're going to be adding in a new object. This is going to be a UV sphere. The reason we're adding this UV sphere is this is going to be an outflow object just in case any smoke gets out of that little hole. What we'll do is we'll scale this up to be about the same size. Then in edit mode, I'm just going to select the majority of the bottom right here, press X, and then delete it. Now we just have this small top and then I'll drag it up just slightly. What we're going to do with this object is we're going to jump over to the physics panel, enable fluid, and switch the type over to flow, and then for the flow type or the flow behavior, I mean, we're going to switch it over to outflow. This will delete any smoke that exits outside of this small hole. Then with this object, we're going to enable fluid, switch the type over to afector and then make sure I planar is checked, and then for the surface thickness, we're going to go up 2.1. Also, for this object, we also want to make sure that this I planar is enabled right here as well because this is a non manifold mesh. And that's basically what we need to do for our collision object. Now when we simulate it, it should work properly. Next, for our flow object, go ahead and select it, click on fluid, switch the type over to flow, and then for the flow type, we're going to leave it on smoke, the flow behavior. We're going to switch it over to inflow. For the other settings, we're going to bring up the sampling substeps up to ten because this object is moving very quickly. We want to make sure the sampling is high enough for it to calculate properly. In the flow source here, we're going to set the surface emission a bit lower to 0.5. Then the volume emission, we're going to go up to one and this will allow more smoke to enter our domain. You can also turn on initial velocity right here and then bring up the source value up to 1.5 and enter. This will allow a lot of smoke to fly off and hit the edges of the collision here as the sphere is moving around. Our domain object, we can press Alt H or option H to bring back our domain. Go ahead and select it, enable fluid, switch the type over to domain. For the resolution divisions, we're going to go up to a value of 160. Then we're going to scroll down here. We don't really need any border collisions because the border is going to be this kosphere. But what we will enable is the adaptive domain. Go ahead and enable that. For the threshold here, we're going to be enabling dissolve for the simulation. We want the threshold value to be a little bit lower. We're going to go 20.01 and that should allow no clipping to clip off any of the then we're going to turn on dissolve right here and set the end frame to 15. If you want the smoke to last longer, you can go up even further, but I think 15 is a good value. Down at the bottom here, we're going to set the end frame to 200 to match the end frame in our timeline, and then we're also going to switch this to modular and then is resumable just in case we want to stop the bake. The other thing I forgot to do with our flow object is we're going to be turning the used flow option off at frame 70 right here. This will allow the smoke to dissolve and then it'll be a seamless loop once all of the smoke has dissolved. What we'll do is on frame 70 right here, we're going to add in a keyframe to the use flow. Go one frame later, 171, turn off the use flow, and then add in another keyframe. At the moment, it's going to emit smoke all the way to frame 170 and then it's going to turn off, then the dissolve will happen, and then on frame 200, it'll loop and it will be a seamless transition. With that done, let's go ahead and select our domain. Make sure you save your project just in case this crashes and then click on BAC data. Once the BAC is done, we're going to set up the material lighting and then render out that simulation. 47. Glowing Smoke P3 Lighting & Materials: Alright, the Bake has finished, and here is our result. If we scroll through the timeline, you can see the smoke is looking pretty good and it's stayed within the boundaries of the kosphere object, and that is very nice. Now in this video, we're going to be setting up the glowing effect and the glass sphere around our smoke. First off, we'll jump into the front view by hitting one on the number pad, and then over in the outliner, let's hide all the objects that we don't need, which includes the kosphere. I'm going to hide it from the view and hide it from the render. And for the flow object, we're going to hide that as well. And then the outflow object, let's hide that from the view and from the render. The first material that we'll set up is the smoke, so go ahead and select your domain. We're going to come up to the top right, split this view, and then switch it over to the shader editor. Right now it's using the default shader, so let's go ahead and delete that principled shader. We're not going to need that. Then we're going to press Shift A and go over to Shader and then select the principled volume. I'm going to press iclos off that properties tab as well. We're going to take the volume and plug it into the material output. We go into the rendered view, we still really can't see the glowing smoke and that's because we need to take the density attribute and plug that into the emission strength. To do that, press Shift A, go over to input and add in a volume info node. We'll place that over there on the left side. Then we're going to add in a converter color ramp. Take the density, plug it into the bottom input, then the color is going to go into the emission strength right here. To control the strength of this, let's add in a math node, place it here, and switch the type over to multiply, and then for the bottom value, let's go with a value of 25. That's looking a little bit better, but our smoke is very pixelated. So let's fix that in the render EV settings. Over in the Bender properties, we're going to open up the volumes tab right here and set the resolution from 1.8 down to 1.2, and that's going to give us a lot more detail in our smoke. Then with this color ramp, we can control how much smoke that we want to appear in our scene. What I'm going to do first is switch this over to ease and that's going to give us a much smoother smoke as you can see. Then I'm going to drag it over to the right side just slightly like this and I'm going to drag the white handle closer to the left and that's going to give us a sharper edge along our smoke. Then one more thing we're going to do is add in a new handle, drag this to the right side and just give it a slightly gray color, something like that. If we skip to a different frame, you're going to see here, if we drag this all the way down to black, that's going to give us a lot more transparency right in the middle of our flow object, which I don't really want. I only want a little bit. Right around here about halfway down, that's going to give us a nice effect. For the color, we're going to come over to the principled volume, set the color down here to a nice blue color, something around here will look pretty good. If you wanted to, you could switch it over to a green, red, pink, whatever you want. I'm going to go with a nice blue color, something around. There is going to look pretty nice. Now for our glass object, let's press Shift A. We're going to add in a new mesh and then select UV sphere. We're going to need to scale this up and we can re enable the icosphere to see the exact size that we need, we'll scale it up to match the icosphere right about there. Then at the moment, this is very low poly. Let's press Control two, and that's going to add in a subdivisient surface modifier, which will really smooth it out. Then from here, right click and Shade Smooth. I want to double check that the smoke is looking good, so I'm going to skip to a frame where the smoke is touching the walls. If we zoom in along the edge, that is looking pretty good and that's basically the size that we need. The material for this UV sphere, we're going to create a new one. Then with this principled volume shader, we're going to bring the roughness down to zero and then the transmission down here, this is for the glass. We're going to bring this all the way up to one. Now we still can't see our smoke and that's because the transparency is also at one. What I want to do is bring this lower down to around 0.2 or so. If we toggle overlays, now we're getting this effect and this is going to look pretty good once we render this out. Over on the right side, we're going to enable tracing to get some nice reflections. And then also with this material, we're going to jump over to the material tab down in the settings right here. We're going to change the render mode from dithered over to blend, and that's going to give us a much smoother gradient along this edge. You can see if it's switched to dithered, we get this very noisy pattern, but blend gives us a really nice look. If you think the transparency is a bit too high, still, you could go down to 0.15. That might look pretty good. With that done, we can go ahead and close off this tab now. We're not going to need the shader editor anymore. Let's jump over to the EV render settings. I'm going to open up the film tab and turn on transparency. This will allow us to add in our own background in the compositor later. Then underneath the color management, let's set the look to high contrast. That's going to make the colors pop a bit more. If you think the color is too saturated now, you can select the cube, and then over here in the principle volume shader, you can change the emission color. I might drag the saturation slightly lower like this, so it's not as bright of a blue color. Something like that will look pretty good. For the camera, I'm going to jump into the front view and then hit Control Alt Numpad zero to snap the camera to place. Then we'll select it and drag it back until we get the entire frame in view, maybe rotate it along the X axis. Somewhere around here will be pretty good and we'll rotate it up right about there. And then over on the right side, I'm going to select the point lamp and delete that. We're not going to need it in our scene. From here, let's do a render by hitting F 12. Once the render is done, we're going to jump over to the compositor and then add in a background and some glare. Once the render is done, you can hit escape and then jump over to the compositing workspace right here. Make sure used nodes is checked, and that should enable the render layers, the viewer, and then the composite node to pop up. To hide the dope sheet, we can click and drag the bottom left here, and then to zoom out our image, we can press V a couple times and that will zoom it out and then tB, we'll zoom it back in. First off, let's add in that background by hitting Shift A. We're going to go over to color mix, and then add in an Alpha overne. We'll place that here. Make sure the image is in the bottom input, and now the image right here, this color controls the background of our render. I'm going to drag this over to a blue color and then drag the lightness down until we get a very dark blue color, maybe slightly less saturated. Something like that will look pretty good. Then to add in the glare, we can press Shift A, go over to filter, and then add in a glare node and place it here. For the method, we'll switch it over to fog glow and that's going to give us a nice glow effect. Then you can play around with the size if you want it to be less or more, you can change that here, and then the strength you can change as. Well, I might bring the strength down to 0.7, maybe 0.8. That looks pretty good. The size slightly higher. Right about there is pretty good. Last thing we'll add to this compositor is a vignette to darken the corner so that the focus is right in the middle. We can do this very easily by adding in a mask and then an ellipse mask. You can control shift left click on this to view what this looks like, and then all we need to do is bring up the sizes right here until it goes along the corners. Something around there is pretty good. Maybe we'll go 1.1. Then to blur this, we need to add in a filter, blur, and then add in a normal blur node, switch the type over too fast, and then for the size, let's go up pretty high to 320. Maybe we'll bring the size down actually somewhere around here will look pretty good. To bring this into our composite, let's press Shift A, go over to color, mix, and then add a mixed color. Take the image and plug it into the bottom input. Now we take a look at this, we're going to need to switch it from mix over to multiply and that's going to get rid of all the white values, but keep the black values and then we'll bring the factor down until around point. Let's go with 0.25. And there we go. That is looking pretty good. At this point, I think we are ready to do a final render. Go ahead and save your project and then over in the layout tab, let's set the end frame to match the end frame of our simulation, which is 200 and then we'll double check that the smoke actually disappears on frame 200, which it does. Now when the animation plays entirely, it'll loop seamlessly. When all the smoke disappears, it'll restart and then the smoke will reappear and then go through the entire animation again. Over in the output tab, let's set a directory of where we want our frames to go to. Once you've found the folder, click Accept and then for the file format, I'm going to leave it on P and G because this will take a little bit longer to render and then we'll sequence it out afterwards. After you've set that output, let's come up to render and then select render animation. 48. Glowing Smoke P4 Sequencing the Render: The render is done, and now let's sequence all of the frames into a movie file. Now, we did cover this in the section where we did the campfire, but we'll just go through it one more time really quickly. Up at the top right, we're going to switch the mode over to the video editing workspace. Then we're going to hit the backspace to restart the timeline, go over to add Image sequence, and you're going to want to navigate to where your frames are min are in this folder, press A to select everything, and then go add Image strip. But also make sure that it's set by name and not modified date or it'll play backwards. Go ahead and add that in and then over on the right side, we're going to switch the file format over to a movie file. In the encoding down here, you can set the container to whichever one you want. I'm going to leave it on MP four, the output quality, I'm going to leave on high. Then over in the render properties, we want to double check that the color management is set to standard with no extra contrast. Because at the moment, if we were to switch this to AGx or high contrast, it's going to automatically apply another layer of high contrast on top of the high contrast that we already rendered the frames. Make sure it's set to standard here and it'll leave it at the exact colors that we have for our render. Also for the look, I want to make sure this is also set to none. Once we've done that, double check that the output is right here in the directory that you want. Then go over to render and then select Render Animation. This will sequence all of the frames into a movie file and put it into the folder that you set for the output. But there we go. We've now completed this section and we've made it all the way to the end of this course. Thank you very much for watching all the way to the end and if you did every single video up until this point, congratulations on completing the course. Where do we go from here? Well, I recommend just jumping into blender and messing around with some more smoke simulations. You have a reference of something that you want to create that is extremely helpful, like an explosion or some sort of smoke simulation. Look up references and then try to create that on your own. Again, thank you so much for enrolling in this course, and I can't wait to see what else you guys create.