How to stop smoke filling entire sim grid ?

[stevesideas]

I read this somewhere but cant find it after many searches.

I just want a puff of smoke..so, smoke on and then off after a few frames, then just to fade away....

[wxyz]

animate the discharge

[stevesideas]

Doesnt work for me. If I have smoke set to 1.0 in the phoenix source, as soon as I change the discharge to 0 during the sim, the smoke just stays there and gets bigger

[stevesideas]

The other thing I dont understand is even when the sim shows smoke filling almost the entire grid, it wont render....

[wxyz]

Animate the dischargea and the smoke, then resim the whole animation range

[stevesideas]

Is there a difference between having the sim running. Then when a certain frame is reached, adjusting the discharge etc and then continuing the animation to keying the discharge....Im not sure there is, in which case, this doesnt work either. The smoke remains.

[jordanw]

no, there shouldnt be a difference between animating it and just changing it mid sim.
As far as the rendering goes, if you are only using temperature in the Transparency and Diffuse you will only be rendering using the temp channel. Try changing the Diffuse source to Smoke and the transparency to simple smoke to get it to show up.
You can then animate the simple smoke factor in the Transparency to fade it off if you cant get it to do what you want in sim.