Blast unnecessary fields

When doing a pyro simulation for a simple smoke you won't need all the fields for the render. Removing those fields is the best way to save some disk space.

In general, here are the only fields you should be saving:

• Smoke
  • density
  • vel (optional)
• Fire/Explosion
  • density
  • temperature
  • heat
  • vel (optional)

In general, the velocity field should be deleted if it is not used for driving an other simulation or having motion blur on your render.

Reduce resolution

The more voxel you are saving, the more disk space you will be using. Some fields do not requiere as much details as others.

Reducing the velocity field resolution by 2+ is a good pratice, furthermore that this field is a vector field (3 times heavier than a scalar field).

Compress

The same as what JPEG compression is doing to your image, compressing a volution will group voxel with similar values together.

Masking

To use in combinaison with compressing volume. This process consist to setting a null / zero value to all voxels that will be invisible at render time.

Example: when rendering flames you do not need to save the velocity/heat/temperature where your density is almost transparent.

Use VDB

VDBs, at the difference of volumes, only save voxels where there is information. They are great for storing a smoke trail or any other drifting volumes.

Result

Here is a quick example of how each optimization described above affect the file size. This is the file size of 100 frames after processing each "steps" above.