Rendering overview
BLUX results render with Blender’s own tools. How depends on the solver and the Simulation Output mode.
| Solver and mode | What you render |
|---|---|
| Atom, Hydro: Points | A BLUX_Render point cloud through Geometry Nodes. |
| Atom: Instances | Instanced grains for sand and gravel. |
| Atom, Hydro: Surface | A liquid surface mesh. It streams from cached PLY files through a Geometry Nodes Import PLY tree. Whitewater renders on its own BLUX_Whitewater object. |
| Blaze: Volume | An OpenVDB volume sequence on a BLUX_Blaze object with the Blaze material. |
| Impact | Fracture shard objects with exterior and interior materials. |
In this section
Section titled “In this section”- Lookdev materials: turnkey shaders for water, honey, mud, lava, concrete, brick and glass.
- Blaze Look: how smoke and fire are shaded in the viewport and the render.
- Geometry Nodes: read simulation data as attributes.
- Render settings: what BLUX sets for physics renders.
- Surface meshing and Whitewater for liquids.
Cycles and EEVEE
Section titled “Cycles and EEVEE”Both are supported. Liquids and volumes are heavier in Cycles. Some choices help in either engine:
- Render volumes at 64 samples or more. The denoiser at low sample counts softens smoke.
- Liquids chain many refractive interfaces, so raise Cycles’ transmission and transparent bounces. See Render settings.
- Turn on motion blur. Surfaces carry a
velocityattribute, and Blaze bakes store a velocity grid.
Command-line and farm rendering
Section titled “Command-line and farm rendering”Baked results read from the cache files, so blender -b -a renders them with no solver running. Cached frames must be present on the render machine, in the cache folder the file points to.