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Yes, I didn't want to bore everyone with unnecessary details. As said I already combine multiple rendered assets from different engines... you do whatever is the most efficient for the desired outcome. Problem is as I mentioned where you put the production loading (in post or in the cgi development... it depends on the job and the subject matter). There are lots of secondary benefits to working out how to do certain things in cgi as opposed to in post though. Bottom line is aesthetic control - using stock photography can be very limiting. Have you ever spent a few hours searching stock image sites of the right images? It's not fun and you're not increasing your skill by doing it. Dead time.

BUT as of 10.1 Octane is rendering volumes much faster, good job guys. It's looking very promising.

MoGrafik wrote:

sdanaher wrote:Hi Haze

It's rendering high-res print imagery for advertising)

Hey, just thinking sideways a bit here, but if it's a print / still thing, I'd imagine you'd be much better off forgetting about rendering the smoke / atmos / volumetrics, and do yourself a favour and look to source some high-res smoke stock and implement it in post production. That ought to save you tons of time and technical workarounds.
If it really has to be rendered, why not render out TFD as a separate pass and composite it on top of an Octane render? I've experimented with this and found it can work well. For me the big difference is that TFD native renderer allows for sub-grid detail / veolcity displacement, which can be nice for achieving a sharp, wispy look.

It might be worth looking into "mis-using" the velocity grid as a way to do micro-displacement. I have managed to do this by accident once. I'll try to get some more detail on this.

haze wrote:

It might be worth looking into "mis-using" the velocity grid as a way to do micro-displacement. I have managed to do this by accident once. I'll try to get some more detail on this.

Oh? Yes, please do share.

TFD does a lot of sharpening / smoothing tricks to get it really crisp. You can get some of that by using the Volume Gradients, but I almost always post sharpen TFD sims to get them even crisper.

Here's an attempt to match a couple of flames:

TFD:


Octane:


Definitely not quite as sharp but not that far off, and with some post sharpening it'd probably come a lot closer.

That was just using the Volume Gradients:



And this is the TFD's Mapping to get that top render:


cheers
brasc