personally, i would give it a 5, the smokes are too smooth and it makes it look phony,
i believe the smokes are too dense for too long, it should have more natural Brownian motion into it, not just expanding the smoke clouds, but also dispersing
Considering that it’s simply a type of volumetric texture in the Cycles node system, there’s nothing in my mind that prevents you from trying to ‘fix’ the realism issues using things like color-ramps and procedural textures.
Smoke sim in Blender is… ehh, it’s good. It’s not great. It’s nice to have a free tool, but it’s not going to be winning any competitions against PhoenixFD or FumeFX. The High Resolution options are lacking, and are implemented as fully post-proc operations elsewhere, cutting down dramatically on sim times. Also, in Blender when doing a sim with and without high res enabled, and between different resoluions, the resulting sims are COMPLETELY different. This shouldn’t happen, ideally, as it makes it impossible to do a rough sim to get the basic flow right and then up the quality for final simulation. It could probably benefit from a complete rewrite from the ground up, but the problem is the same as it always is: Finding a dev who is both able and willing to take on the task. Integrating something like a fluid solver isn’t nearly as easy to do in Blender as it is in other packages.
Wasnt the aim of the GSOC - mantaflow integration to help improve the fluid & smoke system in blender – http://vimeo.com/103540182
It is a computer generated sim, I should be able to control the flame, make it dance and jump through hoops if i wanted it to, but it just goes up Sure i can apply forces to it and push it around a bit, but ultimaely it still just rises. as a smoke sim, just for having smoke and flames its fine 8-9/10 as a tool for artists, 3-4/10
I love it, but there are a few issues,
ENERGY for particles, as a value,
collision with other objects can transfer energy, or a object or a light or?
so a object can have “states”
at energy 0 -> .5 - particles do this - smoke does that
at energy start - finish - particles do this or smoke does that
so things can freeze, or glow depending on energy…
also, I use particles and simulate, then use the particles for smoke for blender internal…
I have had some nice results,
also, you do know you can turn down dissolve to 0 and then have the emitter move right?
what can’t you do that you want to?
I may be able to help.
oh yes moving the emitter is one thing, but try getting the direction of the flames to grow in a certain direction, then do a loop or something, or flow from a sphere in the direction of the normals. it just doesnt. even if you use particles for the emmiter the flames still only rise up. there should be some way to constrain the flow to a curve somehow or define the normals as the flow direction.
We can make a list of the things here that, in a sense, are almost exclusively found in FOSS.
Areas abandoned and becoming broken because of no developers - mainly just FOSS
No developers to improve half-baked tools - pretty much something mostly found in FOSS
Backwards design decisions just because - Again, practically a FOSS only thing
People not polishing tools because that’s boring work - Pretty much only found in FOSS again.
In short, Blender has done pretty good for FOSS software (possibly the best out there in that category right now) and in some areas has even looked to succeed in shaking off the classic FOSS tropes. Blender and Krita unfortunately, in terms of creative software is only in the minority in terms of quality and polish and most of FOSS firmly remains as the type that firmly establishes the bottom of the barrel in software (along with and perhaps even below the ‘free’ crippleware category). On that, if not for Blender’s success (followed by the rise of Krita), I would’ve started to think that FOSS literally has no future as a way to develop productivity software and fade away as a failed paradigm.
You get what you get though, the smoke sim may not be like FumeFX, but it doesn’t look like garbage either.
To end, have you thought of filing a bug report for the sim differences or can it not be determined, does any know if the original dev. still hangs around the community from time to time or does he not use Blender anymore?