Controlling Smoke Emission with Texture/Material/Shader in Cycles

Salutations, good people.

In one of my current projects, I aim to control the emission of a smoke simulation with a noise texture (my goal is to have flames emit from procedurally generated/controlled bright spots on the surface of a sphere).

Is it possible to use a particular texture or shader node to control the smoke emission? And, if not, is it possible to fake it in a very accurate and/or convincing manner?

My apologies if this has been covered, but I wasn’t able to find any relevant topics on this forum after a cursory search.

On the emitter/flow object, under “smoke flow advanced” there are options to add an emission map.

I’m familiar with this feature, but I hope to use a texture node as an emission map; and texture nodes don’t show up in the selection box there. Is there a way to output a texture node as an emission map while retaining the ability to control it within the node setup?

Working fine here:


If you are referring to Cycles nodes, no you cannot use those. They are part of Cycles and Blender itself cannot calculate them.

Ah. Dang. I’ll figure out some kinda workaround. Thanks.

Addendum: would it be possible to plug my Cycles node output into a Blender texture? Through the use of an addon, perhaps?

No, Cycles nodes represent things that Cycles itself runs during render time, there’s no way to calculate them in Blender directly. You can bake them to an image texture and use that, however. Add an emission shader with strength=1 to your mat, plug your texture into the color layer, and bake the “emit” pass. Depending on your situation that may or may not work though.