Mist and Smoke

I learned before that when creating a mist or fog in a scene that has a smoke sim, that you exclude the domain from the z-depth pass. Unfortunately, using the Z-depth pass to drive the haze resulted in unclean edges. I did a bit more research and came across the Mist pass in cycles. It works beautifully, except that it excludes the smoke completely and treats it like it’s in the far background.

I’m having trouble uploading the screen grabs, but I’ll give it a go…

Before Haze - Black smoke - Good


Seems that I can only upload this one right, which only shows how the smoke should look. With the mist pass, the smoke is white.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]405971[/ATTACH]

Why not just render the smoke on its own layer?

Try to render the smoke in another layer

I need it to interact with other parts of the scene, reflecting off objects and such. This will be for a bunch of animations too, so I can’t just fake it.

It still can, include the smoke layer on your main render layer, but uncheck the poorly-named ‘layer’ flag. That will just disable primary visibility. It won’t appear when viewed directly or affect the mist pass, but will still appear in reflections and cast shadows. You’re already faking the fog, why can’t you fake this too?