Hey all, first time poster here,

In my scene I have 2 pyro sims, flames only (RS emission sourced from temperature) and I am trying to illuminate a smoke volume between them (see images) with GI from the flames.

My instinct is to push emission scale in the shader, but I really have to crank it up to get enough light on the surfaces and the volume, and doing so naturally starts clipping and distorting the flame colors.

My questions are:
a. How do you balance this situation out? Do you compensate emission intensity by using darker colors for the flames? or
b. Is there a parameter to control secondary ray intensity on other objects? I know I can do that with regular material channels but I can't find it for volumes. I would prefer to keep the smoke absortion B/W because I want to add colored lights later on.

Thanks in advance, happy monday!

I don't think material emission can actually light a volume. What you might need to do is convert those objects on the side of the screen to a mesh (VDBConvert set to polygons), to use them as a mesh light. Then you will have have a Volume Contribution field (which defaults to 0) that you can increase to illuminate the central volume.