Fluid Source vs Pyro Source

[art3mis]

On the subject of smoke and pyro I've seen smoke sources or emitters created in many ways

Two common ones seem to be

1 using a Pyro Source SOP followed by Volume Rasterize Attributes

2 Using a Fuel Source SOP

The first using Pyro Source seems to be the more 'modern' method but is there any reason, performance or otherwise, why you might still use a Fuel Source SOP?

[char]

I've just recently looked into understanding a bit more about this topic. Obviously in Houdini, you can achieve the same thing multiple ways. Let's say we take away the computation time of each technique, the effect will be pretty similar to another at the end, right?

Houdini is being developed and optimised well enough and as an artist you want to stay on top of things when these "modern" methods like you said, come into play.  So if you don't have any other reason to use old methods, I guess don't use them. Pyro Source from what I've seen and tried is a much more straight forward way in terms of how fast it computes and I find it way more intuitive. It's also cleaner to me. Workflow wise you generate points with certain attributes like density and so on, either on surface or inside a volume (different methods on Pyro source), you can then add attribute noise to these points and at last you volume rasterize these attributes into voxels which the solver can then read, but at this point I'm sure you already know most of this.

I can't really elaborate on any other aspect apart from performance increase and how clean the setup using these nodes.

Hope that helps.