This lava sim was created using a combination of shelf tools and custom tweaking. I used the shelf tool “emit lava” on my emitters, but created my own temperature attribute that has turbulent noise in it, to make the lava more dynamic looking. I also created secondary emitters that are smaller and slightly above the lava emitters. I also assigned noise to their emitted lava, as well as the attribute “ptemp”. I used this to delete points so that only ones with a cooled ‘crusty’ appearance would remain. In the AutoDOP network I tweaked a few settings for their cooling rates and viscosity ranges until I was happy with the result.

Once I had cached out my lava surface, I created an empty geometry node and used an object merge to bring the mesh in. I used a delete node with an expression that deleted points based on temperature, so that I would only be working with areas of the lava that hadn’t cooled or darkened yet. I then scattered points on this and created a file cache and cached out those points. I then made a fluid source node and added the temperature to the scalar volumes. I then made a null to use as the output. I used the shelf tool billowy smoke on the emitter I had made. I changed the generated connection in the AutoDOP network to pull the source density from the out null I had made. I played around with the pyro solver parameters until I had a look I liked.