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Classic Vorticity | vorticity – Adds small-scale detail that is dissipated naturally by the grid-based simulation. Prevents the simulation from becoming smooth and laminar. Unlike Turbulence, which does not care about the fluid's motion at all, the Classic Vorticity algorithms works depending on the velocity of the simulation and changes the velocity field in order to reinforce vortices and add more detail to the simulation.For more information, see the Vorticity example below.

Massive Vorticity | velvort – This mode generally improves the vorticity detail and behavior. Unlike Classic Vorticity which reinforces vortices throughout the grid, the Massive Vorticity gets applied more strongly only to some parts of the fluid, making a difference between thin air with no smoke or temperature, the smoke and temperature's surface, and the inside volume of fluids. The added detail is equally strong for both the fast and the slow moving parts of the fluid. Massive Vorticity also does not produce a boiling effect that is present in the Classic Vorticity algorithm, which tears up the slower moving parts of the fluid excessively and stops the fluid's motion. For more information, see the Vorticity example below.

Smoke Surface/Temp. Surface | vorticitySurfSm, vorticitySurfT – These options create vortices only on the smoke/temperature channel's surface without disturbing the flow in the inner volume of the fluid. This way massive vorticity won't block the fluid's general motion and break the fluid apart as the classic vorticity does. It's split into separate smoke and temperature multipliers for additional flexibility. For example, in a fire-only simulation, you need to use Temp. Surface, while in a smoke-only simulation, you need Smoke Surface instead.

Large Scale | vorticity_low – The large-scale multiplier reinforces the big vortex flows in the inner part of the fluid. The effect is similar to what higher Conservation quality can achieve, with the difference that the Large Scale vorticity does not respect obstacles, so it might not be suitable in a more complicated setup. For more information, see the Vorticity example below.

Method | refltype – Specifies the method for simulating the conservation. For more information, see the Conservation Method Types example below.

Direct Symmetric – This method has a long range and can transfer movement and pressure from one point of the grid can to distant parts of the grid. It also achieves strong conservation without having to boost the quality too much, and thus the fluid can roll and swirl quite well. Thus it is well suited for simulation of explosions with shockwaves.

Direct Smooth – The smooth method is quite similar to Direct Symmetric. It produces a smoother velocity field and is stronger than Direct Symmetric, but doesn't keep the symmetry that well and it will produce less detail.

Buffered – This method has the weakest conservation strength and shortest range, but produces detail that works well when simulating fire.

PCG Symmetric – This method provides a very strong conservation, but works at a shorter range than the Direct Symmetric method. It actually produces better symmetry than Direct Symmetric and so it can be used to simulate nuclear mushrooms or other effects where high symmetry is crucial. It is also the best method to use for smoke or explosions in general. The Uniform Density option is ignored in this mode, so simulating only fire with this mode may not produce as good results as using the other methods that allow Uniform Density to be enabled.

Quality | reflprec – Increases the strength of the conservation. It will help cases when the liquid or smoke is losing volume, or the swirling of the smoke needs to be increased. Beware that increasing the quality will slow down the simulation. For more information, see the Quality example below.

Uniform Density | uniform_mass – When enabled, the mass of the fluid will not be considered. Fire simulations work better with this option on, which ignores the mass. However, unchecking this option might be useful for pure smoke simulations or explosions (for fire/smoke simulations the inverse of the temperature is considered the mass; the hotter fluid will be lighter and the cooler fluid will be heavier, just as in nature).

One of the most important parameters of the simulator, with significant impact on quality and performance. To understand how to use it, keep in mind that the simulation is a sequential process and happens step by step. It produces good results if each simulation step introduces small changes, but it's also a trade-off between performance and detail, as described below.

For example, if you have an object that is hitting the liquid surface with high speed, the result will be not good if at the first step the object is far away from the water, and at the second step, the object is already deep under the water. You have to introduce intermediate steps until the changes of each step get small enough. This parameter creates these steps within each frame. A value of 1 means that there are no intermediate steps and each step is exported into the cache file. A value of 2 means that there is one intermediate step, i.e. each second step is exported to the cache file while the intermediate steps are just calculated, but not exported.

Signs that this parameter needs to be increased are: