Ankit Pruthi

Another simple trick is to use random_sobol() instead of rand(). Its designed to give a more evenly spread-out distribution.

Just out of curiosity, what was the bucket size while using micropoly engine?
The reason for raytracing using less ram i guess is instancing. Packed primitives are a form of instance and hence, it would be loaded in memory only once and transformed as and when required. Micropoly engine would dice everything and then render it.

Another reason for slowdown was micropoly running surface shaders on micropolygons rather than at ray hits. In case of surfaces with opacity stacking, micropoly will probably always be slower than raytrace here (esp with stochastic transparency). But for some reason if you do want to use micropoly (displacements and motion blur perhaps), try lowering the opacity limit on render tab.

Hey guys!! Sorry for taking the video offline for the moment. Its really not a video but recording of a chat i had with a friend and is very unclear.

I am trying to squeeze some time in to make a good video tutorial on this.

Meanwhile, simplest way to set this up is to setup a basic smoke sim using the shelf tool for billowy smoke.
After that, setup the particle sim using the shelf tools and add “pop advect by volumes” node and point it to the path of the node imorting the pyro field. Alternatively, you might want to write your pyro sim to disk and load it to avoid simulating the smoke again and again every time you want to make a change to particles.

Here is a file attached showing the same. Cheers!!