Let's make some tweaks to the Volumetric Shader before proceeding with the rest of the tutorial. Open the Phoenix Simulator → Rendering rollout and click the Volumetric Options button. The Volumetric Options contain the shading parameters for rendering fire and smoke. You can think of that window as the Phoenix Volumetric Shader. In the Smoke Opacity rollout, set Based on to Smoke. The Opacity Diagram below should now become active - it is used to control the thickness of the smoke. The difference between the Smoke and Simple Smoke option is that when the Opacity is set to use the Smoke channel, the Opacity Diagram below can be used to make changes to the way the Smoke is rendered by using the opacity curve. With Simple Smoke, you get a single Simple Smoke Opacity multiplier that acts as if the Based on was set to Smoke and the curve below was completely straight, going from (0, 0) on the left to (1, whatever value Simple Smoke Opacity is ) on the right. To summarize: Based on: Smoke gives you access to a curve which can be used to control the thickness based on the value of the Smoke channel for a given voxel while the Simple Smoke provides a single uniform multiplier only. The Opacity Curve in the diagram below is tweaked as follows: Point 1: (0.1, 0) Point 2: (0.95, 0.08) Point 3: (1.0 , 0.3) This change is essentially removing all the sparse smoke. If you want to get a clean preview of what your changes are doing to the Smoke, you can go to the Fire rollout and set the Based on option to Disabled to isolate the Smoke. |