Blender Tutorial - How to Create Steam w/ Mantaflow

[@drinnerd8532]

Holy crapp... finally... FINALLY... FIIIINAAAAALLYYYYYYY!!!! It FINALLY happened! Someone finally created the absolute best, least confusing, clearly stated, in-depth Blender Smoke Sim, tutorial that is ACTUALLY UP TO DATE!!! God bless you, BLENDER MADE EASY!!! Subbed!!

[@BlenderMadeEasy]

Wow, thanks! I'm glad you liked it!

[@drinnerd8532]

@@BlenderMadeEasy you don't understand man... I've spent days looking for THIS EXACT tutorial! Thank YOU, sir!

[@drinnerd8532]

@@BlenderMadeEasy where would be the best place to post questions about smoke simulations in Blender for you to kindly, answer for us? Would it be here or somewhere else? (I apologize if you have already answered this question in your video!)

[@satyakatta714]

smoke sim is cool, but it makes my computer simulate real smoke from the fans

[@BbankK_48TH]

Wait mine include fire

[@Sairawkerh]

😂😂😢

[@nigellill3222]

I've been trying to create this since 2.79. Thanks dude, really appreciate it, no seriously, i've been praying for the day someone would do this. You're the best 👍

[@BlenderMadeEasy]

Glad I could help!

[@nigellill3222]

@@BlenderMadeEasy Understanding the material setup, it could easily be tweaked for pipes, cigarettes even hot food in a bain marie. Again, thanks heaps.

[@nigellill3222]

@Con Koumis Worth the wait 🙂

[@chiapp8]

How do you do at 2:42? I haven't the taxture tab! Thanks

[@nigellill3222]

@@chiapp8 which version of Blender are you using ?

[@moonbaboon9326]

Great video, only feedback I have is the "why" we are doing things would help tremendously with trying it ourselves in the future. I know you go back and say some of the reasoning but it all happens very fast. If you could give a quick "I put .6 here instead of 1.5 because at 1.5 you would be speeding the smoke up too much and giving it a undesired result, .6 slows the fluid and allows for you to get the full color and volume". Just that simple line could help so mush when people are doing projects without your assistance/ Either way great video and setup! Allows all us donut heads to look special.

[@fletx8858]

That was just freaking fantastic, thank you! Edit: Btw, this is the only video if found where the smoke isn't this super dense fantasy one, instead a real steam look, thank you very much for that!

[@sunnysanjo]

using this for Blenderguru's donut tutorial!

[@quinnwill4520]

instaBlaster...

[@AsdisAtHome]

Same :D wild time

[@Duckers_McQuack]

Same lol

[@LeLouisLafontaine]

Ahaha sameeeee

[@lloadded]

same

[@lyva]

I'm literally doing everything as said but there is nothing showing up after its finished baking

[@randomike__]

Thanks man! Always getting back to ur vid to remember how u got this result! And, I don't think anyone mentioned it but we can also hide the cylinder after baking, it will not affect the smoke

[@dvklaveren]

Love it when the card overlaps the demonstration.

[@troygordon2]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Finally, a video that isn't run like the Micro Machine Motor Mouth guy at 90MPH. Thank you for a VERY well-done video at a normal speed that doesn't guess or skip and lays it out. Easy subscribe from this guy. Thank you for helping me make my project that much better. My project is much bigger than a tea cup, but still awesome advice and easy to tweak walk through.

[@bastian6173]

Very fast for beginners but I'm gonna take a full day now to try and rebuild this. Very nicely done :)

[@richardlonigro4178]

5:27 i dont have a bake data button here :( any idea why?

[@Ikea_is_cool]

Same

[@halodragonmaster]

I can't help but laugh and say (with me being almost finished with the blender donut tutorial), that this would be perfect to do *after the blender donut tutorial* Thanks so much for putting out all this content on youtube. Really appreciate it.~

[@vanessanzediegwu5464]

me too, lol

[@erzajumeidi]

Yup lol, when i finished my coffee mug last year and it just not enough. Also back then it was heavy and slow, also hard to shape, i gave up and use 2d alpha of image as last resort.

[@bruht101]

us fr

[@cosminmosmin]

I love how much more this tutorial actually is

[@cosminmosmin]

If someone wonders, I only managed to get this working starting from the quick smoke effect that Blender offers

[@JohnnySix]

Great tutorial, very easy to follow, and for the first time, I understand the relationship between emitter / source vs volume/domain, and wind! Thanks for sharing!

[@spudguy5]

For some reason my inflow object doesn't emit any smoke after baking the data, i've copied your settings exactly. If I play the animation I drop to about 0.2fps and I can see the mesh expanding like smoke is there, but I can't see anything. What could be wrong?

[@jaysgword]

same here, wonder if you were able to figure out, has been frustrating because not a lot of people are talking about it...lol

[@SkullsForSale]

Yeah and I wish he would've mentioned what the bake was going to do, took forever. Wish I could've edited it more. Kinda my fault for not knowing what bake does though.

[@GavinBadenhorst]

I found it can be helpful if you can't see the steam in some scenes, to move the second Multiply node to the output of the ColorRamp Node instead of at its input

[@dasmetzi6009]

Thank you for sharing, it looks great ... but I just had no smoke - not in the viewport, not before and after the bake, not during rendering, not with Modular / Replay / All (Type) ... not until me I set "Format Volumes" from "OpenVDB" to "Uni Cache", it worked - for whatever reason, but it works now - many, many trys later! ^^

[@tfossgh]

Thanks, dude. Same problem here.

[@BerbayJR]

it is still not working for me =( should I bake the data?

[@antonybond]

This literally saved me, I didn't know what was wrong until I read ur comment. Thank you very much!!!

[@HaruSuzukiHD]

Thx happend the same to me

[@josiahjots1376]

In Eevee I don't see smoke but in Cycles I do.

[@haroldlindley6620]

a good way to make the material work for both cycles and eevee is to plug the final math node into both the density and the emission strength slots for the principled volume and set that math node to a value like 0.2. From there, just unplug it from density when rendering in cycles. and plug it back in when rendering for eevee

[@TheBlarg]

Im currently trying to figure this out to work in cycles. beginner doing Blender guru donut and wanted to add this for a coffee but im not seeing it at all in render, only solid or wire. cant see it in any mode towards last steps before baking once i change the type to Modular from Repeat.

[@snebold]

Wow! An actual clear and concise tutorial. Thanks so much!

[@jasicestmoi]

Thanks for showing and explaining complicated stuff in easy! Your video helped me a lot!

[@christopherk4166]

I stupidly stopped watching the tutorial after the "bake" step, thinking that the rest was just setting up the scene with lights and stuff. Then I got confused because I couldn't see the smoke when I rendered it. If you are having problems, watch until the end. Also, If you are trying to add smoke to an existing coffee cup, you'll need to tweak the settings since the scales are different (the coffee cup for the tutorial is about 1.7 meters in diameter). Try downloading the .blend file in the description and follow along there first.

[@nathanielchamron]

I did the same thing 💀

[@TheBlarg]

this needs to be towards the top. spent 6 hrs stressing 🤯

[@FilmSpook]

Infinite Thanks, my Friend!! You're an Awesome Teacher 🙏🏾

[@puregarbagefilms]

never thought of using emission shader. thanks!

[@JCMGZappy77]

Lovely tutorial. The steps were quite easy to follow but sadly, for some reason my inflow object doesn't emit any smoke after baking the data, I've copied your settings exactly. If I play the animation I drop to about 0.2fps and I can see the mesh expanding like smoke is there, but I can't see anything. What could be wrong?

[@ThePowr123]

If the scene is bright try playing with the light source, its definitely a subtle effect. Or you can darken the color of your back drop. Make sure when your applying the shader nodes that you have the cube that you set the domain to, not the cylinder that has the smoke effect. Hopefully that will help!

[@psychichigh]

I found the same thing, but after mucking around with everything realized I had a couple of settings wrong. What also helped was the smoke was being generated but not actually coming up and out of the cup, so used a second wind generator placed just under the mesh generating these particles, as well as with the other wind generator ended up angling it up a little so it wouldn't collide so much with the cup.

[@JCMGZappy77]

@@psychichigh That makes a lot of sense! I overlooked a lot of details. Thank you!

[@Somerandom1922]

I've just applied this to the new Blender 4.0 Donut tutorial by Blender Guru (it's a testament to how good this guide is that someone as new as me could do this). I've added a hot-chocolate, and thought some steam might help. Yes it massively increased the render time. Yes it's totally worth it :)

[@prajwalkharel9754]

i hope u did this as a separate file. I tried adding it to my donut file and ended up scaling the cup to the relative size of my donuts and other objects. BIG MISTAKE. This smoke generation doesn't work if your domain size is small.

[@Eirik_Tube]

thank you so much! Fantastic tutorial. (works in 4.2)

[@blenderzone5446]

Awesome simulation!!! Thanks for sharing

[@mango2005]

Great tutorial thanks. The interface is a little different in V.4. Denoising Normals and Denoising Albedo doesnt appear in the "Render Layers" node for me. Im wondering could it be video card dependent. I use a NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1650. There is a reference to Albedo in my Render settings area though.

[@nuke2625]

i tried this on my bbq animation and this looked sick af. thanx

[@21EC]

Perfectly realistic result...it looks really good.

[@말랑이-v1s]

I changed the cube settings as you explained around 3:45 and now the cube scale is getting smaller. Why?

[@vanslededesign3386]

Damn a lot of information and steps, people who are capable of master blender are awesome and intelligent.

[@Seekin_confidence]

You are godly for this just helped me make cigarettes smoke

[@galadrhim1]

It looks like this coffee cup is not using real world dimensions - i.e. it looks to be a 2 meters wide given the size of the cylinder added as the steam source. So how does one scale down the steam settings for a realistic sized cup, like no more than 10 cm across? Which settings are important for size scaling?

[@BlenderMadeEasy]

The smoke simulation will not work when it's scaled down that small. That's why the cup is so large. Blender doesn't work well with small objects and simulations.

[@galadrhim1]

@@BlenderMadeEasy Rats! I was afraid of that. Is it possible to scale the results of the simulation after the fact? Bake, then scale down? Thanks for the reply above, BTW. Just found your channel. Subscribed.

[@BlenderMadeEasy]

Yes, I just tested it and you can scale down the domain after the bake is done. If that causes any issues you can also try adding a Volume Object. This will allow you to scale it down and move it however you like very easily. I did a couple tutorials on that. Thank you for subscribing! :)

[@galadrhim1]

​@@BlenderMadeEasy Thanks again for the reply. I ended up rerendering the whole thing after setting all relevant objects' origins to the bottom of the cup. Without doing that, scaling the Domain would scale the container but not move the smoke accordingly. It's possible I did something to screw that up initially, but this worked well. I did, however, have to adjust the shader a bit. The color ramp, and the emission, and one of the math nodes needed to allow the smoke to be stronger. Thanks for the help! Given that real-world small scale smoke doesn't work well, cigars, kitchen fires, and other small simulations will all need scaling down. I really want to model and render in real scale just to be consistent in everything I do. You never know when you'll need to combine assets, and it's better, in my opinion, if they are ready to go.

[@speedasian]

Thanks a ton for bringing this up. I've been banging my head on the desk for days now trying to work this problem and searching to see if there was something going on. I had steam that was a bizarre proportion and there were only so many bakes I could do before losing my mind. Thanks for asking the question I didn't know to ask!

[@hemanth3080]

fantastic tutorials as usual. Great job.i am learning a lot of animation from you

[@FreelancerGraphicDesigner]

It's working just in solid mode

[@MrMargaretScratcher]

Whatr's the difference between setting up the denoising as you have done, vs just enabling denoising in the render tab?

[@GiftFromGod]

*Anxiety attack on final stage of Donut tutorial* Transparent cup with condensations or solid cup with steam?! I came here hoping I could add steam to my cup but first thing you said was: "put cylinder around here and make sure it isnt visible!" Great video though!

[@Jason-uv5tm]

Could you explain your problem a bit more? thanks

[@antonioalmeida1155]

you dont need to put any cylinder nor make the cup not glass. Simply do to the liquid what he does to the cylinder.

[@Flowerpot2905]

Very cool - thank you. I also had the "no visible smoke after bake" problem that others in the comments have mentioned. But it was because the default project was still set to Eevee renderer, not Cycles... My mistake... :-)

[@MysteryFinery]

why are you making better tutorials then the others :D

[@minipisa7595]

Using Blender 3.2. I'm using Cycles. I couldn't see the steam in material preview or render view, only solid view. I wasn't showing in my render either. After looking through the comments and doing some searching, every solution wasn't working UNTIL 11 minutes into the video they talk about Eevee settings using a Principled volume and upping the density - I could finally see it! Still using Cycles. So for anyone having the same issue, definitely try this first.

[@faustoart]

Perfect explanation, thank you for the good work!

[@ongakuwo]

One big thing no one mentions is the scale of your scene. People with different results should probably go check that first.

[@mwauraerick]

Thank you so much...The material is genius!

[@khanlakhno2757]

Wow, this tutorial is fire! I mean smoke... :D How about making a cigarette smoke tutorial next? I have not seen it on KZbin

[@Jason-uv5tm]

You could do the same thing as you do here, but change the direction of the force and maybe make it a bit darker

[@synapse349]

I liked learning about the light path node

[@synapse349]

This is what i came up with for skinny wafty smoke kzbin.info/www/bejne/nJq9cnZ-mLNnZ68

[@af98]

I really needed this tutorial. I was giving up and thinking of just using actual steam but filmed infront of a greenscreen

[@mistube]

Hey mate, Its a mighty fine tutorial you made there, but as i so far have experienced with blender and dynamics, is that blender seems to work better with smoke and fluid in oversize scenes wich is quite sad. or at least that is my experience, so if you wanna make your setup here work on a real lifesize cup insted of your cup, wich is 1.7 meteres big what would you change in your setup, to get it working as fine, but with a naturel sized cup ?

[@alensam4672]

You are a genius!😄

[@rockstar745896]

Why does my smoke appear in wire frame and solid mode, but does not show in either material preview or render mode?

[@GenericGoon95]

At 5:27 after baking why does the domain change locations relative to the cup?

[@zsix6]

thanks for the tutorial. its fantastic. i tried adding 2 wind, baked it and the smoke doesnt seem to be affected by any wind at all. is there a limit to it?

[@jackschaberg4970]

Great tutorial, as always. FYI, this crashed for me several times using 2.92 Beta and 2.93 Alpha. I had success with 2.91.2.

[@AnthonyCupo0012]

Thank you for a great tutorial. Straight forward and informative.

[@dannfr]

You the real man .

[@searchingforcoconuts2248]

not working for me... domain cube just getting smaller. Any ideas?

[@searchingforcoconuts2248]

not to worry, I started again and it worked out, great tutorial

[@ruslandad365]

Amazing Tutorial!!! Thanks!!!

[@KatlinSchirmer]

Wow Super Tutorial ,Thanks dear!

[@filipinhox]

Bro, my smoke didn't look like yours, is it because I used a sphere instead of a cylinder? And also, does the number of subdivisions influence when animating?

[@WouldShop235]

Where can I find the smoke color item if I don't see it? 2:47

[@ИгорьИльин-ь4ш]

Very, very strong! Excelent animation! 👍

[@ВладимирГусейнов-г4ю]

after rendering I don't see smoke on transparent background..

[@scottlee38]

Very photorealistic!

[@MonuYadav-oj5iy]

Thx sir this tutorial really help me to add smoke on my Katana XD

[@chuzzbot]

Great tute, super usefull!

[@WatchMysh]

Awesome! Thank you so much for this helpful tutorial!

[@capturedskull4269]

thank you for this great tutorial!

[@uzairbukhari99]

Awesome, just what I was looking for. This got me thinking, is there any way to save these simulations and import them as like planes? This can save a lot of memory if I can import them as planes. Is that possible? If so, will you do it?

[@dannfr]

yeah i think you can , try rendering the simulation alone itself and then use that mp4 as a image texture in principled bsdf (" you must be thinking how can you use mp4 in image texture but actually you can there is some tweaking but it can take mp4 videos as a animated image textures " ) and make sure to use mix shader with transparent shader and yeah most important when you render the simulation don't forgot to make the background transparent you can do this in render settings under "film" dropdown . try this i think this will work but i have not tried it myself so might no work.

[@BlenderMadeEasy]

I believe so! I'll have to look into that but that could make for a good video! Thanks!

[@BlenderMadeEasy]

That video is now being uploaded right now!

[@uzairbukhari99]

@@BlenderMadeEasy thank you very much! You do listen to the audience and I love it. It'll help in speeding up the render. Aslo, I've seen people using normal maps and images to fake the geometry instead of modeling it. I hope you got my point. See if you can do that tutorial too!

[@Jason-uv5tm]

​@@BlenderMadeEasy the link if anyone is wondering: kzbin.info/www/bejne/f2nCp6SOf7R_otU

[@TheTrueGentleman]

This was exactly what i was looking for, great tutorial.

[@raw_pc]

Epic job man. Thank you for sharing

[@jaa70]

beautiful but where could I see the physics equation that uses blender in order to simulate the smoke projection ? please pass me the reference

[@TheScenicRoute-mm4ku]

I am new. I got lost at 1:38 - how did you change the view after you put the cube in? Thanks!

[@hotbergina]

play with the gizmo top right. Or the shortcuts for the differents views are numeros like 0, 7,9...try them

[@skeebles3dgraphicsandwebde171]

Brilliant Tutorial

[@mortenstovegaard8856]

Thanks for the great tutorial!! I am relatively new to Blender, so forgive me for asking a potentially stupid question... After baking the data I don't se any smoke when playing the frames. Any suggestions how to fix that?

[@matts2080]

I have the same problem, dont know

[@bennazarro6826]

Hey! I've been following this tutorial to try and recreate a similar smoke/steam effect from Yeek's new music video (Valencia) and what attributes would I need to change to make the smoke fall instead of rise? Your videos are great!

[@laf0106]

try adding the vortex wind to face down.

[@Earthtone88]

I can't get the meandering steam effect. Been trying a couple of days. Just a straight steam, slightly blown to the side by the wind. No definition also. And the color ramp will zero out the entire shader. have to mute it to see the steam.

[@rockittt]

I followed this guide used all the same settings, smoke never was visible, at first I thought maybe it doesnt work in Cycles, I changed to Eevee and it still wasnt there. I never really got physics to work in any way I found desirable except maybe rigid body and I can say Ive mastered a large majority of Blender but manta flow and, making fire and water scenes just never works and its too annoying to figure out why a body of water spawned in a place that I DIDNT place the inflow object or why affectors dont affect certain things or if they do, the timing seems way off and/or innacurate.

[@WillFalcon]

Modular does not work with particles, there is nothing but empty. Replay does, but there is no way to cache it. UPD: I foud why - enabled noise destroys everything.

[@jamiescott1364]

i allways forget about the threshold on the adaptive domain and im trash with matts so the whole color ramp trick blew my mind lol

[@leonid5489]

that snapping on 06:22 with Strg+Alt+Numpad_0 doesn't work form me. I can't get any further. 😢

[@BlenderMadeEasy]

Just move the camera manually then. You don't need to use that shortcut.

[@leonid5489]

@@BlenderMadeEasy ok thanks :)

[@murrowboy]

Can I adjust this technique to have stronger smoke? I want to do a tail pipe that blows smoke horizontally for a while until the goes up.

[@nicolaspojmaevich]

Awesome, exactly what i needed now i'm going to make a vdb and import it to unreal lets see what happens

[@bransomething]

Thank you for this one. It looks great!

[@brandtvargas2767]

Is it possible to change the smoke to like numbers

[@tintinolho]

so goooood!

[@ccchoon6334]

thanks a lot!!! BTW, how can I get the desk material? or how to make the material?

[@nathanielthe3rd354]

For some reason I can't see my steam sim when I connect the density fac into the emission strength fac

[@omerrudnick8195]

Can this be applied to the liquid inside the cups, assuming that it's just a painted mesh?

[@nettotourokuyou]

I have a question. I followed this method to render only the steam part with transparent background, but the result was a completely black video. I could see the steam on the render image screen, but the render output was black. How can I export only the steam with transparent background? By the way, I set everything the same as this video until the end, and when I exported the video, I checked the transparent option in Film, set the file format to FFmpeg and chose RGBA, and used Quick time, QT RLE/QT Animation or PNG as the container and video codec, but they all turned out black. I would appreciate it if you could enlighten me.

[@eliaspashialis3710]

Hey, not sure where I'm going wrong but after baking I can only see the smoke in wireframe and solid but not in rendered mode or when I render the image ...

[@hotbergina]

HELLOOOOO :D thanks a lot for this video !!!!!! i have a question, i use your tutorial for a cigaret and i want that the smoke is more and more big and that the domain get bigger with time... how can i ?

[@cheers9839]

How to do it, I mean to see the smoke in the rendered mode when my background is a wall with a texture on it? When I try to connect emission to emission bar in the principled shader, the string is red. I'm not very advanced in blender so I don't know ho to do it. Thank you for future help! This video is amazing, I subscribed right away!

[@Samuel_Maillard]

How do you know that, by putting this node and this node, it will give you the result you want ? Is this simply done by experience or is there some rules to know ? Because for me it's just sorcery.

[@reflex6311]

I tdid the exact things you did and got a fire and not even close to the shape u got as smoke. Yes i checked the inflow is in smoke but i got fire idk how....pls help fast, Im using 4.0.2

[@marchinoasti]

Great! Interesting even if it's complicated for me anyway ...

[@infirite72]

My PC took 30mins to bake the data is that normal?

[@pd5156]

Is any way to direct steam on a curve to move it to the ventilation hole?

[@hugocominazzi9575]

Hi I still have some weird line on my simulation, someone know how to fix that pls ? i don't found issue on web..

[@kordru]

can you describe the line? it's possible it could be a hardware issue if it happens on all smoke simulations

[@Downer01]

This is cool. I have done it. Thanks :)

[@TzofeOJ]

why when I select domain to the cube and switch to the flow object, it does not switch from one to another, I can't ADD it's the same settings the domain, I can't add new settings, it just changes the previous one so I can't edit the settings for each and one of them