fumefx or afterburn?

[jonnybefree]

hi all,
i will have a project next week where we have to work with lots of fume on a stage.
my question is now if anyone has experiences with fumefx and afterburn, and can suggest one of those or not.

best regards
jonas

[unknown]

yes. depends what effects you want to achieve.

[joconnell]

Afterburn will get you the look of thick smoke very quickly but it's only a shader - it won't give you any movement. You animate a particle system to get the movement and then use afterburn to render cloudy puffs on each particle - kind of like sticking a ball of cotton wool on each. It is quick though since it's using underlying particles to control the way it moves.

Fume on the other hand is slower to use since it's doing actual fluid calculations for the movement of the smoke - you need to run a simulation first for the movement, then tweak the look of the fire and smoke second. With fume you're going to get less control over the movement of the smoke since it's simulating real life, the good thing is it looks so natural and correct there aren't normally that many changes to it.

[unknown]

what he said....

afterburn is quicker for smoke trails, dirty plumes etc. but needs a lot of tweaking to get the noise and movement right. the cotton ball effect can be very noticable.

fume is much more natural, and can achieve pretty much everything that afterburn can, but tends to be less controllable. i
it reacts to objects, wind etc, where as afterburn is attached to particles.

[jonnybefree]

thanks for your comments,
there have to be some "fog" effect on a stage.
with a lightshow and some objects wich interacts with the fog.
would be nice if the fog scatters some light from the laser show.
are there problems with fumefx-Vray?

[joconnell]

None so far - if anything it renders quicker with vray due to the undersampling. Vray area lights would be pretty painful to render due to soft area shadows so you might be better sticking with standard lights.