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Blender Smoke - Adaptive Domain

49
By on Google Summer of Code

Blender's smoke simulator currently uses a fixed 'domain' - the volume in which all smoke simulation takes place. You can often spot this when smoke seems to hit an invisible boundary. Miikah is currently working on replacing the fixed volume with an adaptive one.

Miikah writes:

Early testing testing of adaptive domain size feature I'm currently working on.

When it's enabled: smoke domain scales it's resolution and size to only match areas where smoke is. This enables very fast simulations of large smoke areas if only one part of the domain has smoke at a time.

You see two bounding boxes visualizing domain area.
1) The static one is the "normal" domain area, basically it just defines the size and location of the simulation.
2) Then there is that moving area. It's the actual simulated and stored part of the domain, adapting to simulation content.

Note: This is an experimental feature I'm working on as a GSoC 2012 project. Development happens in the "soc-2012-fried_chicken" branch.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

49 Comments

    • Husty on

       thats what i was thinking, so like why not completely abstract the domain concept to the end user? since the results are the same

      Reply
      • Daniel on

        This essentially IS having no domain, since you'd never see the borders. All it comes down to is stopping the domain from actually being visible, and you won't notice the different. However, I'm the type of person who thinks more control is always better, so I'd prefer if the domain stayed and we could see what it was doing, and hide it if we don't want it.

        Reply
    • guest on

      Having no Domain is not possible, since the blender world is nearly infinite, so it would cost alot of calculation. Also it's some kind of optimization, if you need such a big domain, you can be sure that there is something wrong with your scene. ;)

      Reply
  12. Kirill Poltavets on

    Smoke is becoming more and more tasty! :)
    Is it possible to make a system with hundreds of small domains which will be acting like small "puffs"? Linking all this to separated particles probably. So I mean all these domains will take fewer place than middle sized adaptive. Am I raving now :) ?

    Reply
    • winnertakesteve on

      Technically already possible: I often see people use the simulation domain as the volumetric material, but you can use a completely separate object and simply point the mapping coordinates to the domain object. If you just keep adding textures from multiple domains, you can essentially create a mega volume containing multiple simulations. Maybe not hundreds, but a start :)

      Reply
    • Daniel on

       On the contrary, it's the only one I've ever gotten good at because I found it much easier than the rest...

      Reply
  19. NRK on

    Two gotchas, smoke domains really mess up textures in BI if the cross other objects, they also cannot colide with each other if there is more than one (bad things happen if you do).  Hopefully these issues will be improved in cycles.

    That being said  THIS IS AWESOME... thanks sooooo much.

    Reply
    • Kram1032 on

       That was exactly my thought.
      Though, I guess it's a bit more difficult to pull off with stuff that's never actually supposed to disappear.
      Smoke dissolves into invisibility after some time. The same thing for fluids wouldn't work so well.
      But if you still have a maximum domain size or something like that, I'd think it should work just fine.
      That or SPH particles finally get propper skinning.

      Reply
  22. Matt Heimlich on

    Wow, I suggested this in the BA thread at the beginning, but never expected that it would actually happen. Great job! This sort of reminds me of Lagoa adaptive domains.

    Reply
  23. john on

    Great!!!! It s prefect.
    Can be plane or cylinder or ball.
    If cylinder , it made look like missile.
    May i ask. Tutorial?

    Reply
  25. CGNick on

    I could stare at this all night long. EXCELLENT work Miikah!! you make us proud to be blender users, and you are doing one hell of a job. keep it up. :)

    Reply
  28. Shinsaku on

    This is awsome, now it'll be easyer to make fireballs or magic stuff. ^^
    Can't wait for it to be in the trunk. 

    Reply
  29. Juang3d on

    The biggest problem for smoke right now is that it can't collide with animated objects, so it can't collide with a car, it can't collide with a character, and this is a nonsense for production use of the smoke feature.
    The adaptative domain is great because it will give freedom and will add speed to the simulations, anyways, the collissions are pretty important, and are being ignored in blender since always (look at the speed a fluid can collide with an animated objecs, it takes ages, and the smoke simply can't).

    Congrats for the feature, but please try to add collissions for animated meshes.

    Cheers.

    Reply

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