I'm working an a short 2min animation, fully smoked based, in order to emulate a kind of ink effect on all my characters, landscape, etc (all the object in the scene are smoke emitters). Obviously, the cache files takes a lot of disk space (I mean : a lot!!), and a lot of baking time.
Basically, I'd like to generate the smoke data once for each type of object, and re-use it every time I have the same kind of object in a (different) file.
For an example, if one of my scenes contains a mountain, emitting smoke, with specific smoke settings, for a specific number of frames etc., and another one contains another mountain, with a a completely different shape. Can I use the generated smoke cache from the first object with the second (assuming that I desire the same smoke settings on both)?
I know that ticking the "external path" option, and giving to it a path allow to reuse the generated smoke data.
But my question is: what will be shared exactly? Can I use the data between two files, containing different objects of different shapes, but with the same desired domain and flow settings, in order to save some disk space and baking time?
Actually I don't understand precisely what kind of exact information is stored in the ".bphys" cache files.