Over at Blender Development we're starting to see some interesting videos as people test out the new smoke system being developed by Daniel Genrich for the 2.5 release. If you haven't been keeping an eye on the main blog, then here's a roundup of the latest developments.

There was an article about Daniel's work on the smoke simulation early last month. Since then we've seen a lot of cool videos by Daniel and other users all around the world. Take particular note of the final video in this list, by magiciandude - the composite smoke test, it has a very cool demonstration of the smoke simulation in practice, plus plenty of demonstrations.

Keep in mind this is still in development, builds can be found to download on graphicall.org (any revision of 2.5 after 22053 has smoke built in)



Throughout August we've been seeing a lot of speedups, see the graph below, Daniel's managed to get a 400% speedup reported in one blog post, due to usage of the Preconditioned conjugate gradient method (of course!)

(The green line is the current speed, lines above are past speeds)

Heres the roundup of video demonstrations:

Multiple puffs of smoke:

Youtube link / Blog post

Comparison between heavy and normal smoke settings:

Blog post

A user's test using fire with smoke:

Youtube link / Blog post

Explosion test:

Blog post

Dissipating smoke:

Blog post

Comet:

Youtube link / Blog post

Multiple smoke flows:

Youtube link

Smoke composite test by magiciandude:

Youtube link / Blog post