ReUsing a Smoke Cache? (Voxel Data texture)

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

Hi All,

I have spent some time and I have a Smoke cache that I like. What I want to do now is re-use it in another scene.

Here is my workflow:
Add a material to the default cube.
Put the material in Volume mode.
Add a Voxel Data texture to the material.
Set the File Format to Blender Voxel.
Browse to my existing smoke cache and select the first frame in the cache.

Shouldn’t I see some kind of preview at this point in the process? I have given Blender the path to a valid smoke cache, yet the texture shows me a blank preview even if I scrub the timeline. And when I do scrub the timeline I see some kind of refresh action occurring but nothing is ever draw except blankness.

Is this the correct way to use the Voxel Data texture?

2

Hey, so I tried this out and it looks to me like a broken feature. I haven’t found any documentation on re-using a smoke sim cache, so I’m not totally sure if it is broken, but I think I would go ahead and file a bug report on this.

3

I would guess that the smoke cache files are in a data format only the smoke simulator can read…

4

I just did exactly this on a job. I merely appended the smoke domain from the original simulation into the new scene which worked just fine.

5

Thanks for the feedback.
I am not trying to bring a new domain into a scene. I am trying to re-use the smoke data, in a material.

I am inclined to agree with LswaN. I am not sure if it is broken or simply not tested.

The tooltip for the File Format for Smoke claims ‘Renders Voxels From a Smoke Simulation’.
The tooltip for the File Format for Blender Voxel claims ‘Default Binary Voxel File Format.’

So it could be a file format mis-match as Tame suggests.

The question is…What program generates a valid ‘Default binary voxel file format’? I assumed Blender made this file, but maybe not?

6

I just tried appending, and it works, but the problem is that appending will result in Blender creating a new copy of the voxel data cache. This isn’t very nice if you have a cache that is multiple GB of data. Linking works fine, as it reuses the original data, instead of make a new copy. But if you want to change anything about the linked domain object, like the material, that opens a whole new set of problems. It would be much nicer to have the feature working so you can just have your voxel data texture directly use the original cache, without having to do a lot of workarounds.