@Jascha_Wetzel & @Paul_Selhi , I thank you so much for your time and patience with me. Below is a summary of my personal findings and experience, for anyone new who may come across this topic:
From the photos attached to this reply, you can see I’ve taken what was explained to me in great detail, and notice that there is no stepping in these photos, and this is without adding a Redshift Object Tag, and without remapping the values using the Old Min & Max settings, this is straight out of the box from TFD, with a constant Density Value set to 1. [The only alteration I did for the 2nd photo was adjust the New Max Settings to make the Density appear thicker]
Keeping your eyes on the value is key, this was something I had to learn the hard way. I also learned that no matter how much detail you implement in these renders, there will always be some sort of stepping involved, even highly detailed ones, but you hardly notice it unless you’re looking for them. The true magic, is lessening the affect when needed. There are 2 scenarios:
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For tight close up shots like flying through clouds for example, require you [or at least me] to have less stepping as possible. This can be achieved from what @Jascha_Wetzel said in his response before this one. What I personal do for quick turnaround, is just set the the Emitter Density Value to 1, leave fuel unckecked. Or if Fuel is checked, set Density to 0 in the Simulations Tab, or 0.5 (play with this value).
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For explosions, having a Density value between 1-5 is ok, your smoke will be thick enough and there really is no reason for you to go past those values from my experience. There will be stepping [minimal], but from a wide shot, instead of up super close up, you won’t see it, and I imagine by adding motion blur, you would hardly notice it. If you do go past the value of 5, the stepping will look like something out of MineCraft. Earlier I had Fuel Density set to 20, which added up to a value of 217 because every second adds more Density, so the stepping was excessive, you can see it in a photo I posted in an earlier post.
Redshift with Volumes does have major flaws though. If you’re rendering straight from TFD, you can add a Redshift Object Tag to the TFD container, go to Volume and lower the Sample Step to smooth out the Stepping. However, if you were to add a Redshift Object Tag to a Volume Container for your VDB, the Sample Step option is gone, and there is no way for you to smooth out the steps. You could increase the Old Max values under the Advanced Tab of your Volume Material, but that gets rid of the detail of your density/smoke. Another gripe is that when rendering TFD from RS, you can’t render Emission by itself, something has to be in the Scatter channel, from there you can just lower the scatter and absorption values to only get emission/fire, it’s weird.
I plan on rendering an explosion from all angles using TFD and RS, and posting it back here as reference from what I’ve learned.
Thank you for reading. I hope someone finds this useful.
Best,
Kenny
