why does smoke simulation in solid view look better than rendered?

Question

i'm styding smoke from this this post's file Smooth decay of smoke simulation and i'm wondering why does smoke simulation in solid view look better than rendered? i mean it's more stylized, but that's exactly what i'm looking for! is there any way to achieve similar to solid view result in render? i know that in solid view the domain uses grid display option so i think i have to look up somewhere in shader of the domain. am i right?

Answer 1

To me it looks as if on the left side, towards be border of the smoke where it gets thinner, i.e. the density goes towards 0, it turns to black.

I cannot exactly reproduce it, but a similar effect can be achieved if you plug the Density output of the Volume Info node into the Color ot the Principled Volume and use a Color Ramp inbetween where you move the black slider from the left in to color the less dense borders with black.

In my example I also made it a bit pinkish red as it it seems in your example, maybe you can even use the density info for some emission. My answer is more a general idea of what you can do to get more stylized smoke, not a finished replica of the reference. It's all a matter of playing around with the settings to get it right. Or to get it somehow as you like it.

As asked in the comments: this works in Eevee as well, but most likely you have to adjust the Volumetrics settings, because volumetrics do not work to well out-of-the-box like in Cycles. The settings shown here are just for my specific scene (especially the Start/End values), you might need them to be different: