This feature is now in the master Blender branch so that means you can now just download it easily for all OSes from the official 2.83 daily builds. I've updated the links in the description.
I managed to load my simulation. It renders perfectly on the vieport. when I press F12 for the final render it doesnt show up. Any clues? I tried gpu, cpu thing you said in anothe comment
For those brave enough to try this feature at this early stage, here's some problems and fixes I found during testing: Problem: Volume renders ok initially but then stops rendering all of a sudden: Fixes to try: Restart Blender Restart your computer Delete and re-create the volume object Problem: Volume doesn't render at all Most of the time I found this was a memory issue so try: In cycles set to CPU instead of GPU rendering Use a lower resolution VDB If you find any other problems, let me know in the comments!
Another problem: Camera clipping and viewport clipping is happening at a certain distance. If the camera or viewport is INSIDE the vdb voxels, the camera and viewport will draw it. But if you zoom out, and the camera escapes the vdb volume box, vdb sequence body starts to chop until the viewport shows nothing.
I know you posted this a long time ago, but i did a smoke sim in another blender project and im trying to import it to another scene and it works except the whole volume moves around randomly. Ripping my hair out here if you could point me in the right direction I would be so thankful!
If you want high fidelity VDB assets to test out in blender that we exported from EmberGen, you can download some from here! jangafx.com/software/embergen/download/free-vdb-animations/
I made simple smoke (but no fire) simulation in Houdini 18. Exported .VDBs and imported in Blender 2.83.5 (experimental branch). Amazing thing that I did not know is setting in EEVEE affecting quality of render in Cycles. For example I made 2 px in EEVEE and sample size (currently rendering, so can't reach exact parameters). Then in Cycles further improve shadows and everything else. Back and fort from EEVEE and Cycles and got pretty decent looking smoke cloud. Thank you Dylan for such great tutorial on how to make things work.
Damn that smoke simulation out of Houdini looks dope. How much faster is it then blender? And Embergen looks really impressive too.. I am baking for hours to get something like that.
Depends of complexity of the smoke/fire. Yesterday tried higher precision (lowering voxel size), and it baked for six or seven hours. Houdini is faster, but then you want more details...
this helped a lot, thanks Dylan! Crazy to see that a paid software I use (modo + Octane) has some weird issues rendering VDBs from EmberGen, and Blender does this for free and better (GPU).
Any chance of some Houdini tutorials, I’ve tried three times to get going with it but just can’t get past the awful interface and just close it down, the first one would be to get rid of all the unneeded stuff so it’s as clean and basic as possible.
I can highly recommend Entagma tutorials for Houdini. They even did one recently about bringing Houdini stuff into Blender and rendering in Eevee. I'd definitely like to do some more Houdini stuff myself, will see how it goes.
If you are only interested in flames you can follow "PYROFX | FIRE & FLAMES" tutorial on sideFX site and about the interface you can customize it and save a work-space or use existing ones . For setting up a simulation quickly use the shelf tools which contain some existing easy one click setups.(like under pyroFX tab / flames + fireball+explosion)
can anyone link me with the windows version of this new objects type the only thing I have been able to find is the MAC OS version and for some reason when I go to that exact site it seems that the post about it has been removed and I cant find this anywhere.
I installed the most recent version of Blender, Volume>Import OpenVDB won't show up. I downloaded the New Object Types and launched the .exe for Blender, it has this option, but then when I try to import my vdb files it reads "Filename" failed to load. Interestingly enough you can import them, one file at a time, but not a selection of files. No idea what I'm doing wrong lol
It's now been added to the official 2.83 alpha so best to download it from there (builder.blender.org/download/) What VDBs are you trying to load? Ones from the internet or from a particular software?
@@DylanNeill3D I created them from Houdini, it's a simple fireball. Apparently Blender didn't like that there wasn't a zero in the first file which previously had a 'one' listed on there. I was able to get all the files in there after changing that, so now the only problem I'm running into is have the entire animation play. Upon zooming in, the first frame of the smoke shows up, but the rest of the animation won't play correctly. (I think I am cursed haha)
Volume "embergen_smoke_plume_a_0" failed to load: IoError: could not get size of file F:\cuccok\Cuccom\2020 februar Blender cuccom\ mappa (2)\Smoke_Plume_01\Smoke_Plume_01\embergen_smoke_plume_a_0.vdb
Thanks for the video. I'm having trouble getting "temperature" to render from an EmberGen explosion. I followed all your steps and see smoke but no illumination.
Hi, first when I import the VDB I made with houdini, there is an error message saying that it's looking for something at frame 0, whereas my sim starts at frame 1. So I made a copy of the frame 1 and named it frame 0 and it works. Then I can manage to see the fire in the viewport but when I hit render I can't see anything just something that looks like the fuel. It doesn't work in EVEE, nor in cycle (GPU or CPU)... It's a shame I was so looking forward to it as I though rendering in houdini was very slow and I thought maybe I could render in cycle using GPU...
For me when i want to render in cycles it crashes instantly. Tried it on different pc and eevee is working fine. I used the examples from the vdb example site..
What operating system are you on? GPU or CPU for cycles? I tried it in Linux and Windows and only crashes I got were when scrubbing the timeline. The main problems I had were with it just deciding to stop rendering (check the pinned comment)
@@DylanNeill3D I tried cpu and gpu. Its on windows and i hit render or go in render view blender closes in less than 1 second. In the university it was a quite powerful mac and my machine.
hi since wonderful tut !!quick question though, since vdb are like sequence can I change the sequences appearing time in blender? for example [001.vdb] appears on frame 1 in blender [002.vdb] appears one frame 2 and so on... so how can I start the vdb sequence on frame50 in blender?
Hi everybody! I'm setting up a smoke-sim in Blender 3.3.1 and all is fine. When saving the cache in Blender it separates the simulation into three folders: - config - data - noise If i start a new scene and import the VDB-sequence from the data-folder. It is very low voxel resolution. If i import the VDB-sequence from the noise-folder, it looks better and more high-res in the viewport but I can't get it to render. I have the same Prinicipled Volume shader on them. Anybody have any clues?
Looking at purchasing a smoke VDB to put into blender and render out a Car doing a Smoky Burnout... What's the best way to do this since the wheels are spinning, I am not sure how to parent the VDB object to the tires and not have the VDB spin when the tires spin... Thoughts?
@@ktech6778 I'm not at a pc where I can check it right now, i think theres 2 numbers therei usually change both of them at the same time if i remember right, It definitely should make it different. Do you have the same problem as Mr Feathers?
@@ktech6778 Hmm, might be in your baking settings then, there is a lot of great blender forums post your question there I'm sure they could help! As I said I sadly am not at a desktop now so I can't check
Hello. I want to export a fire animation to Houdini den blender. However when I come to the volume-import button in the blender and call the vdb files I created, it gives the following error, I write the exact text: (volume ^^firesı m _0001^^failed to load i lo error: could not get size of file C:\users\msi\videos\VDB sequece \firem_0001.VDB.) this is the error. What should I do about it? It gives this error when exporting from houdını to blender .Have a nice day
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 well, in photoshop is possible to save images with png, so I should try! It would be awesome to import photoshop layers and animate them in Blender! thanks for the information! Unfortunately I can't find how to import PNG if I select "import" in 2d animations :(
@GnopKing there are many ways to bring 2D images into Blender but it depends on what kind of animation you want to make. Is it After Effects style layered images? Or cartoons? Or putting images on to 3D objects? Or something else?
@@JJShalashaska OK cool, do a search for "blender compositor tutorials" on UA-cam and that should get you started. You can bring in psd but you don't get access to the layers so you'll probably have to split them out into separate files.
Can I ask, is it better to render in eevee or cycles because whenever i render in eevee, im not getting the exact representation of what im wanting through the viewport
Make sure you've grabbed the latest version of 2.83 from the experimental builds section (link in the description, no need to use blender.community now) What OS you on and what VDB you trying to render?
Wondering if you would have any suggestions to bake volumes to slices similar to this method ua-cam.com/video/4ggS6G9HIh8/v-deo.html but in blender now that we can import vdb. Thanks in advance.
This feature is now in the master Blender branch so that means you can now just download it easily for all OSes from the official 2.83 daily builds. I've updated the links in the description.
Nice
Can you Make Optimus from movie Transformers
thanks! I'm just curious what division size did you use in pyro-sim?
I managed to load my simulation. It renders perfectly on the vieport. when I press F12 for the final render it doesnt show up. Any clues? I tried gpu, cpu thing you said in anothe comment
Is it possible to import a destruction simulation into blender from houdini
For those brave enough to try this feature at this early stage, here's some problems and fixes I found during testing:
Problem: Volume renders ok initially but then stops rendering all of a sudden:
Fixes to try:
Restart Blender
Restart your computer
Delete and re-create the volume object
Problem: Volume doesn't render at all
Most of the time I found this was a memory issue so try:
In cycles set to CPU instead of GPU rendering
Use a lower resolution VDB
If you find any other problems, let me know in the comments!
Another problem: Camera clipping and viewport clipping is happening at a certain distance. If the camera or viewport is INSIDE the vdb voxels, the camera and viewport will draw it. But if you zoom out, and the camera escapes the vdb volume box, vdb sequence body starts to chop until the viewport shows nothing.
Did you notice wrong color pallete? You want blue cloud or fire, but you get red. Changing for example red, it actually change green...
volume "[name]_0001", failed to load "[name]_0000", it works when I rename all the files but it is a bit long...
I know you posted this a long time ago, but i did a smoke sim in another blender project and im trying to import it to another scene and it works except the whole volume moves around randomly. Ripping my hair out here if you could point me in the right direction I would be so thankful!
If you want high fidelity VDB assets to test out in blender that we exported from EmberGen, you can download some from here!
jangafx.com/software/embergen/download/free-vdb-animations/
Would love to buy EmberGen, but it's missing Mac support ;)
@@MarCuseus We have plans to support mac sometime next year.
@@jangafx Great answer! :D
Can't wait.
@@jangafx i tried importing one of building implosion inside blender and nothing shows up, any help?
I made simple smoke (but no fire) simulation in Houdini 18. Exported .VDBs and imported in Blender 2.83.5 (experimental branch). Amazing thing that I did not know is setting in EEVEE affecting quality of render in Cycles. For example I made 2 px in EEVEE and sample size (currently rendering, so can't reach exact parameters). Then in Cycles further improve shadows and everything else. Back and fort from EEVEE and Cycles and got pretty decent looking smoke cloud. Thank you Dylan for such great tutorial on how to make things work.
Thanks for the video!
game changer! I've waited for this feature forever. thanks for sharing.
Thanx for this episode and links! It's a great idea to play around with this stuff tonight
nice...finally i can render cloud :D
Damn that smoke simulation out of Houdini looks dope. How much faster is it then blender? And Embergen looks really impressive too.. I am baking for hours to get something like that.
Depends of complexity of the smoke/fire. Yesterday tried higher precision (lowering voxel size), and it baked for six or seven hours. Houdini is faster, but then you want more details...
@SEAN MORGAN time to update to threadripper 3990x.
this helped a lot, thanks Dylan! Crazy to see that a paid software I use (modo + Octane) has some weird issues rendering VDBs from EmberGen, and Blender does this for free and better (GPU).
I swear, flaming Suzanne in the thumbnail seemed to me like pirate LeChuck from The Curse of the Monkey Island!
Love your videos Thanks
This is HUGE!!!!
Thanks!
fantastic, my friend. thank you
Love your videos. Thanks a bunch.
I really wish you could out source online Simulation, especially Fluid Simulation, like you can do with Rendering.
That's great news, thanks for the video : ^ )
Any chance of some Houdini tutorials, I’ve tried three times to get going with it but just can’t get past the awful interface and just close it down, the first one would be to get rid of all the unneeded stuff so it’s as clean and basic as possible.
I can highly recommend Entagma tutorials for Houdini. They even did one recently about bringing Houdini stuff into Blender and rendering in Eevee. I'd definitely like to do some more Houdini stuff myself, will see how it goes.
If you are only interested in flames you can follow "PYROFX | FIRE & FLAMES" tutorial on sideFX site and about the interface you can customize it and save a work-space or use existing ones . For setting up a simulation quickly use the shelf tools which contain some existing easy one click setups.(like under pyroFX tab / flames + fireball+explosion)
Also try Rohan Dalvi houdini introduction videos.
Very nice! Thx.
Now is Blender 2.83 alpha Master
Very helpful thanks.
thank you very much
can anyone link me with the windows version of this new objects type the only thing I have been able to find is the MAC OS version and for some reason when I go to that exact site it seems that the post about it has been removed and I cant find this anywhere.
hurray!
Thanks for the great news!!
I installed the most recent version of Blender, Volume>Import OpenVDB won't show up. I downloaded the New Object Types and launched the .exe for Blender, it has this option, but then when I try to import my vdb files it reads "Filename" failed to load. Interestingly enough you can import them, one file at a time, but not a selection of files. No idea what I'm doing wrong lol
It's now been added to the official 2.83 alpha so best to download it from there (builder.blender.org/download/) What VDBs are you trying to load? Ones from the internet or from a particular software?
@@DylanNeill3D I created them from Houdini, it's a simple fireball. Apparently Blender didn't like that there wasn't a zero in the first file which previously had a 'one' listed on there. I was able to get all the files in there after changing that, so now the only problem I'm running into is have the entire animation play. Upon zooming in, the first frame of the smoke shows up, but the rest of the animation won't play correctly. (I think I am cursed haha)
Apparently I had to rename all of the files for it to work, haha sorry to have bothered you!
Volume "embergen_smoke_plume_a_0" failed to load: IoError: could not get size of file F:\cuccok\Cuccom\2020 februar Blender cuccom\ mappa (2)\Smoke_Plume_01\Smoke_Plume_01\embergen_smoke_plume_a_0.vdb
same problem
Thanks a ton!
Thank you!
Thanks for the video. I'm having trouble getting "temperature" to render from an EmberGen explosion. I followed all your steps and see smoke but no illumination.
Did you manage to fix it? (6 months ago)
Hi, first when I import the VDB I made with houdini, there is an error message saying that it's looking for something at frame 0, whereas my sim starts at frame 1. So I made a copy of the frame 1 and named it frame 0 and it works.
Then I can manage to see the fire in the viewport but when I hit render I can't see anything just something that looks like the fuel.
It doesn't work in EVEE, nor in cycle (GPU or CPU)...
It's a shame I was so looking forward to it as I though rendering in houdini was very slow and I thought maybe I could render in cycle using GPU...
awesome
Great tutorial.
Any chance we could see the workflow for the fire in houdini for all the steps to make the fire ?
I did it but the simulation isn’t there
not working with downloaded vdv clouds pack.
official support now with 2.83
For me when i want to render in cycles it crashes instantly. Tried it on different pc and eevee is working fine. I used the examples from the vdb example site..
What operating system are you on? GPU or CPU for cycles? I tried it in Linux and Windows and only crashes I got were when scrubbing the timeline. The main problems I had were with it just deciding to stop rendering (check the pinned comment)
@@DylanNeill3D I tried cpu and gpu. Its on windows and i hit render or go in render view blender closes in less than 1 second. In the university it was a quite powerful mac and my machine.
@@DylanNeill3D With the new build from today its working. Thats awesome i needed it for a project.
@@ArtPomelo Great news!
hi since wonderful tut !!quick question though, since vdb are like sequence can I change the sequences appearing time in blender? for example [001.vdb] appears on frame 1 in blender [002.vdb] appears one frame 2 and so on... so how can I start the vdb sequence on frame50 in blender?
ok got it figured out in the object data property there is a start frame setting
Any idea why my smoke is static when i hit render animation? Single frames are moving but not animation....
If I'm not mistaken Ember Gen cannot export in Open VDB
You currently have to pay for that feature (like $25 month I think) but they're going to do a free trial version when they release a beta version
Is it important enough to be one of the arbiters of “industry-standard” status?
Liking AND Subscribing!
Hi everybody!
I'm setting up a smoke-sim in Blender 3.3.1 and all is fine. When saving the cache in Blender it separates the simulation into three folders:
- config
- data
- noise
If i start a new scene and import the VDB-sequence from the data-folder. It is very low voxel resolution.
If i import the VDB-sequence from the noise-folder, it looks better and more high-res in the viewport but I can't get it to render.
I have the same Prinicipled Volume shader on them.
Anybody have any clues?
Looking at purchasing a smoke VDB to put into blender and render out a Car doing a Smoky Burnout... What's the best way to do this since the wheels are spinning, I am not sure how to parent the VDB object to the tires and not have the VDB spin when the tires spin... Thoughts?
When I try to use gpu compute it cancels. I tried rendering in gpu compute and it said illegal address
Sounds like you're out of GPU RAM. What GPU you using? What OS?
Dylan Neill using the newest 64 bit windows and a 2080 super NVIDIA
Dylan Neill is there a way to use your gpu at all if your scene is higher memory than your gpu ram? Or do you have to only use your cpu?
vdb disappears in material preview and render preview why
Do you find the way to fix that issue?
@@namdhis nope
whenever I import it nothing shows up
Hey , is the render time shorter if you use the Openvdb instead of mantaflow?
please emergen tut with blender...thanks in advance
Yeah I will defintely do that now that Blender can import the sims. Just discovered Embergen recently and it's pretty cool!
Is it possible to create a sim in mantaflow and export that out as and OpenVDB?
Mantaflow already can output VDB but I don't think you can't read them back in using this method (yet)
Why am I getting pixelated smoke and fire?! Whether I make it or it’s a vdb it always has boxes and lines through it!!!! How do I fix this in cycles?
If you still have the problem anwser is you need to put a lower value in "step rate render" under volumes dropdown in render properties tab
@@briost123 I changed it from 1 to .1 but still nothing has changed what am I supposed to do?
@@ktech6778 I'm not at a pc where I can check it right now, i think theres 2 numbers therei usually change both of them at the same time if i remember right, It definitely should make it different. Do you have the same problem as Mr Feathers?
@@briost123 I tried that but it isn’t working
@@ktech6778 Hmm, might be in your baking settings then, there is a lot of great blender forums post your question there I'm sure they could help! As I said I sadly am not at a desktop now so I can't check
Hello. I want to export a fire animation to Houdini den blender. However when I come to the volume-import button in the blender and call the vdb files I created, it gives the following error, I write the exact text: (volume ^^firesı
m _0001^^failed to load i lo error: could not get size of file C:\users\msi\videos\VDB sequece \firem_0001.VDB.) this is the error. What should I do about it? It gives this error when exporting from houdını to blender .Have a nice day
Eevee makes my simulation disappear. Help?
Hey Dylan, do you know also if it's possible to import Photoshop files to use in a blender 2d animation? That would be awesome
Blender can handle all the official standard file formats, such as PNG, EXR and SVG. Can Photoshop deal with those? If so, the answer would be yes.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 well, in photoshop is possible to save images with png, so I should try! It would be awesome to import photoshop layers and animate them in Blender! thanks for the information! Unfortunately I can't find how to import PNG if I select "import" in 2d animations :(
@GnopKing there are many ways to bring 2D images into Blender but it depends on what kind of animation you want to make. Is it After Effects style layered images? Or cartoons? Or putting images on to 3D objects? Or something else?
@@DylanNeill3D hey Dylan, thanks for the answer. I was looking for something like after effects animation, by importing Photoshop layers indeed.
@@JJShalashaska OK cool, do a search for "blender compositor tutorials" on UA-cam and that should get you started. You can bring in psd but you don't get access to the layers so you'll probably have to split them out into separate files.
why in my viewport my fire display like a cube ?
Can I ask, is it better to render in eevee or cycles because whenever i render in eevee, im not getting the exact representation of what im wanting through the viewport
answered in the video....
I followed your tutorial, but nothing renders when I click 'render image'. Is there anything I can do? Thanks.
Make sure you've grabbed the latest version of 2.83 from the experimental builds section (link in the description, no need to use blender.community now) What OS you on and what VDB you trying to render?
Does Open VDB render faster than other volumetrics?
Hi, i imported a VDB in blender but i want to export it to unreal Engine, any advices plz?
Anyone know if this still works in Blender 3?
hi I downloaded blender 2.83 but it does not give me the option to import vdb files ???
Try downloading again, its just been added.
I downloaded clouds from Disney, yet there are a bunch of blocky segments in the smoke when I add the material.... any idea how to fix this?
Have you found out how to fix it ?
@@ktech6778 the new update of blender fixed it. You keep your volume size to 1 and you’re goof
@@mrfeathers3938 it didn’t fix it for me tho
Do you know about 2.83 view port issues ? any fix
anyone have the link the the software he was talking about imbagen cant find it on google!
EMBERGEN
Wondering if you would have any suggestions to bake volumes to slices similar to this method ua-cam.com/video/4ggS6G9HIh8/v-deo.html but in blender now that we can import vdb. Thanks in advance.
I still reckon Blender has better volumetric preview through Eevee and rendering through Cycles compared to stock Houdini.
Import section begins at 2:15
Yo go for a better thumbnail, it would really bump up your views