things were going swimmingly. had a nice little sim going. did a render on a single frame.

ok, time for sleep, so i started a full frame range pointcloud render.

so far so good.

in the morning, i THOUGHT i could now render the darn pyro sequence with scattering now that all of the pointclouds were done.

nope. H10 just keeps rendering the pointclouds. sigh.

help… :shock:

solved. in the pyro shader, settings tap, shading mode: changed to ‘normal shading’

generating the point clouds must have switched this to ‘write all point clouds’

Two other things to keep in mind regarding the scattering.
The point cloud generation is view dependent, anything “off camera” won't have point cloud generated.

You can likely increase the Smoke/Fire step sizes in the shader and reduce the number of points generated.
Mario recommends 10/1 relationship between the smoke/fire step size and Mantra's volume step size as a start.

mantra's default volume step size is 0.1 i believe and the flame/smoke stepsize default is 0.5

is there a reason the defaults have been set for a 5 to 1 ratio rather than a 10 to 1?

next, is there a way to create a ratio field to automate the update of these to fields settings?

for example, set the ratio, then, if one were the change either steps sizes, then the other setting would change accordingly.

a. RMB on the Volume Step Size parameter of the mantra ROP, Copy Parameter
b. RMB on VEX Pyro shader scattering Step Size parameter and Paste Copied References.

Set the ratio you want by multiplying the expression with a value.

Cheers!
steven

smaugthewyrm
mantra's default volume step size is 0.1 i believe and the flame/smoke stepsize default is 0.5

If I'm not mistaken, the pyro shader sets a 0.5 only for the point-cloud generation phase of the render., really because this can be of a lower resolution (than 0.1) due to the lower-frequency changes in scattered light.

render times aside, assuming one had all needed high end equipment, what would be needed settings wise to achieve a fire ball like the below.

i have yet to see this level of detail / complexity. the helicopter fireball is cgi, so i know it can be done.

i think what i want is ‘pyro for dummies’
LOL

i haven't even begun to explore pyro illumination. i'd like to have the flames light the room. later, i'd like to have the flames light proto models so that the flames AND their illumination could be composited over pftracked footage.

i suppose lofty goals are what get me going in the morning.

:wink: