Create GPU-Based Smoke & Fire Simulations Directly in Blender with This Extension

Just like many great tools out there, Fumaris started with a creative frustration due to technical limitations. When you use Blender's Mantaflow framework for fire and smoke simulations, you need to bake each change on the CPU after you tweak a sim setting, wait until it's ready, and only then see the result. Fumaris was made with speed, efficiency, and real-time creation in mind. 

The developer of the extension, Michael Venous, creates car animations all the time. As he explained, having to wait for each micro step to be calculated instead of having the freedom to make quick real-time adjustments drove him to design his own solution, Fumaris.

Fumaris is a two-part extension: a Python add-on that handles the UI and scene export, and a native runtime that takes care of the simulation on your GPU. It uses NVIDIA's Flow GPU solver through Vulkan on Windows and Linux, and through Metal on Apple Silicon using bundled MoltenVK.

In Fumaris, one object holds the simulation settings. Through Collections, Fumaris knows which objects are emitters, colliders, effectors, and outflows. The simulation uses a sparse grid around the active smoke, meaning that your object's dimensions aren't fixed. The live preview is raymarched on the GPU, only returning a viewport-sized image back to Blender, which is why it remains interactive. 

With Fumaris, you can preview your smoke and fire as a volume, pausing and resuming the sim whenever you wish. It allows you to use your own emitters: meshes, particles, Geometry Nodes points, and OpenVDB sources can go into the simulation. Fumatis also lets you control your emission with attributes like velocity, temperature, divergence, etc.

Most importantly, you get to adjust the appearance of your simulation without rebaking. This includes parameters like smoke color and density, flame brightness, and others. Plus, if you feel like you can't settle for one version just yet, you can keep different bakes, as Fumaris has separate cache slots reserved for those. 

Because Fumaris uses a different solver at its core, it doesn't match Mantaflow's parameters, so matching values won't produce the same simulation. However, the OpenVDB output Fumaris uses works with Blender's usual volume rendering workflow in Cycles and EEVEE. Fumaris runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS in Blender 5.2+.

You can get the extension on Gumroad.