Cannot see smoke in cycles

I tried following the Blender Guru tutorial on “how to make fire in cycles”, with Blender 2.73a from blender.org, but at step 2 I cannot see the smoke, only the highlighted empty cube. I tried with GPU via my GTX 760, then with CPU via my i5 4670, but I get the same empty cube no matter what I do. Did I miss something?

I can’t believe nobody answered you more quickly.

Cycles doesn’t support smoke/fire with GPU. You can only use CPU. I know, what a bummer. I tried to do a tutorial the other day and it takes hours to render one frame with my 8 thread system…too slow and I can’t afford to by a 28 thread processor. I also tried render farms which are quick and work but one 10 second animation in 2k would have cost $16. Of course once its in HD you see all sorts of stuff you don’t like so you’ll end up rendering it 5x to get what you want so that would have been $80. Not bad if you have a paying gig, you can factor it into the overall cost of the project.

If you are like me and just dipping your toe into the water, you’ll have to be patient and wait for the blender devs to create GPU support. If you have a real project that pays you can buy hardware (lots of CPU’s) or pay a render farm.

Good Luck.

Finally someone answers!

As I mentioned, I could not see the smoke even with my CPU for some reason, but at least now I know how resource heavy it is and thus is something I will set aside until it is improved as it is not on my project list right now. Now if only I knew why the smoke did not like my CPU…

Thanks for the info krakensurf!

Oddly, I started a different smoke tutorial and couldn’t see my smoke either…blind leading the blind. Did you use the “quick effect” or did you create it manually?

Did you use the “quick effect” or did you set it up manually? FYI, 2.73…select your object, then click the object tab and there is an option for “quick effect” with smoke, explode, fluid…very cool.

I used the “quick effect” route, tried everything I could think of including CPU/GPU with CUDA on/off, but no difference. It is not really important right now for me, was just trying out something new for fun, though I suppose users posting that a new feature is not working may help the devs find and fix whatever the issue is. If you figure out the culprit, let me know so I can see if it also works for me.

I cam here looking for reasons why smoke simulation/QuickSmoke might not be working on my Mac, but it appears to be a more universal problem with B2.74? I’m a complete Blender noob but would love to contribute to the community; how can I submit this to the dev team?

Answering my own question…

I found some good videos that show how to use the Smoke and Flame with Cycles. Check out https://youtu.be/TPnAkuBAu5k for a quick example and https://youtu.be/oSiV5gg_lCs for more of a tutorial.

Go to your smoke domain then materials. open up the node editor and copy what I did in the picture below to get the smoke in cycles render. If you cannot see the picture then just follow these steps:
in the node editor go to add then input then attributes. once you have added it type density on the box below it. then go to add then Shader then volume scatter. connect the dot named Fac on the attribute box to the density of the volume scatter. finally connect the volume dot on the volume scatter to the dot on the material named volume. then render it and you should see the smoke