I’ve run into many issues with this turbo flame sim so far. The main issue is still that the animation moves extremely fast. I have had suggestions to try using trails or clusters, but I currently do not see how they would be useful for this sim. I found a tutorial by Peter Quint for rocket smoke that uses point velocity to help with bridging the gap between each frame that is emitting particles. It works much faster than jacking up the substeps and allows me to keep the substeps low. Combining that with velocity blur, it seems to help quite a bit. But even still, the issue with such a large gap between rendered frames is present. These problems occur with the pyro in Houdini 17.5, but recently, I have experimented with the sparse pyro in Houdini 18, which seems to remove majority of these issues, allowing me to work on increasing the flame size and shaping it.
From one frame to the next, there’s a massive gap in the flames. This particle based method for fast pyro seems to take a long time to adjust due to the particles needing to be cached before the pyro can even be looked at. It is a great solution for normal/slow flames but for something like this, I do not see it working very well unless there is a step that I am missing.
While the color and shape will need a lot of work, this was assembled in minutes using the new sparse pyro in Houdini 18. There is no visible gap in frames and does not have a particle driven source. I believe I will spend more time looking into this method to see if it will truly work for what i need it to.
Another big concern of mine is how to use Arnold’s volume and volume shader for this pyro. The tutorials I have seen usually have some kind of flame appearing in their render without having to adjust any settings on the shader. The documentation doesn’t seem to be very thorough on how to set up for pyro and has old documentation on exporting VDBs from Houdini.
Overall, This sim is very concerning to me with the amount of issues I have run into already. But I will continue to experiment with sparse pyro as this as given me a good starting point right out of the box.