Field 3D Root

Updated: 2 Jun 2025

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This node is the root node and container for any 3D Field system. Field Emitters, Affectors, Colliders, and Rendering nodes should be parented to this node directly or indirectly in order to be operational.

A field system is built of voxels, tiny 3d pixels which contain various kinds of information such as density, velocity, temperature, and more. Each of these voxels runs a fluid simulation, where the data in each voxel contributes to the how the simulation behaves.

As the Root node, it contains a number of controls that are globally effective across the system, and can have wide ranging effects on the simulation. With Fields in particular, much of the motion and shape of the simulation is derived from the simulation properties, therefore familiarity with the settings below is a must for adept use of a field system.

The simulation of a field is extremely VRAM intensive, and the bounds (set either in the root or input) can be used to constrain that vram usage. The Notch Field system is mostly sparse, meaning that the simulation only processes in voxels which contain density data, with the exception that the velocity simulation has to be run over the full grid bounds. As each voxel contains multiple types of simulation data, the more smoke and density in the voxel grid the slower and more VRAM intensive the simulation can get. Therefore, it’s important to set meaningful bounds, to limit the area the simulation can spread, as well as balance voxel size and simulation quality to maintain reasonable performance.

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