Rendering Fire

[Tommy L]

I need to go beyond the usual fire flickering in a hearth for this one. Actually, by quite a long way...

I need to render a rolling mass of flame in the sky. Kind of like a sea of fire really and I need to be able to control the swirls.

Does anyone know of any specialist software for this kind of thing?

 

Im trying using a blizzard particle flow with motion blur at the moment. Im getting best results using scanline. My vehicle of choice is vray. I really need some modelling software that is designed for this though. Either a Max plugin or something external to do the fluid modelling.

 

Any advice much appreciated.

 

Tom.

[mattclinch]

afterburn. no question.

 

http://www.afterworks.com/AfterBurn.asp?ID=3

 

EDIT - actually i've just seen FumeFX by the same people, looks like it could be good to.

Edited August 12, 2008 by mattclinch

[RobNJ73]

Afterburn is good if you're going for explosion-type volumes of fireballs. But if it's more of a naked flame effect you're looking for, then FumeFX is the way you'd want to go.

 

Of course, it might all be easier to do in post... I don't think Afterburn or FumeFX will want to render with VRay. Could be wrong about this point, though.

[Koper]

if you want to go the after effects way, Andrew Kramer just released a new tut called 'Energy' using particles. same effect might be achieved for a fire ball.

 

its not modeling but it looks gr8

 

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/energy/

[Tim_Tam]

^ Seconded.

 

FumeFX ( even though it's great ) is very calculation heavy and you really can't control it at "swirl level". IMO the best solution would be combination of max render and post processing. You could build a "base effect" in max and finetune (add elements) it to your liking in After Effects / Combustion / etc.

 

One thing you should check first would be

http://www.allanmckay.com/tutorials.html

 

And this one by him at 3dluvr.com

http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/83/1

Edited August 12, 2008 by Tim_Tam
small correction