Trouble Rendering Fire

[Michael J. Brown]

How is fire rendered with Mental Ray? With Scanline rendering, it's pretty simple. Set up a gizmo, assign fire to it and adjust settings to taste. But Mental Ray will not render fire via a gizmo.

 

So how is fire rendered with Mental Ray?

 

Thanks a ton.

[SandmanNinja]

Deconstructing the Elements has Fire, Lava, Smoke, Water, Tornadoes, explosions - you name it.

 

I've only read through it, but I want to really work through all the exercises.

[Michael J. Brown]

All done using the Scanline though!!

 

Bri

 

 

Really??? DANG!

 

There HAS to be a way to render effects with MR. This just makes no sense at all. I haven't used scanline in over 4 years! ...And I'm not about to go back to it either.

[Michael J. Brown]

SNAP! I got it to work!

 

At least, it'w working in an isolated scene - all by itself. I'll see what happens once I merge it into the scene where I couldn't get it to work before (with Daylight System active). I'm thinking that perhaps the MR Sky as an Environment Map might be what caused the fire effect not to work everytime I tried it before. If so, I'll just turn it off and go from there.

[Michael J. Brown]

Hi Michael,

 

With a daylight system in the scene and exposure set up for

it you will NOT be able to see the effect of your fire! Just

as you wouldn't see any illumintion from a small hand torch if

you shone its beam onto a patch of Bright sunlight!!

 

regards

Bri

 

 

The fire is in a fireplace within a room. The nearest window is about 25' away and buffered by a wall. No direct light is entering the scene. In fact, very little (if any) indirect light is entering this particular scene. therefore I could elliminate the daylight system without any impact on my scene. It was being used primarily for the room with the window that this space in adjoining.

[Michael J. Brown]

I've disabled EC & the Environment Map (MR Physical Sky). Now all I get is a black flame. Even when I change the smoke color, the entire flame remains black.

[Nic H]

can you not do it in scanline and comp it in?

[Michael J. Brown]

Got it! It was the Photographic E.C. preventing the fire effect from rendering.

 

This really throws a monkey wrench into things for me. I've been rendering sequences for an animation for the past two weeks - with Photographic E.C. And now as I'm about to round out the production work with my two sequences of the lounge (with fireplace), I discover that Photographic E.C. won't let me do fire. So now I've got to either try and massage a lighting solution in Automatic E.C that blends flawlessly with the P.E.C. solution, or just forget about the fire in the fireplace all together.

 

The post-production option of After Effects'ing' in some fire later is out because I niether own or know how to use After Effects.

 

Well...I really need that fire to help sell these two sequences. So I guess it's back down to the 'lab' to craft an Automatic E.C. solution commensurate to the Photographic one - YEAH RIGHT! Good luck, self.

[Michael J. Brown]

Hi Michael,

 

Try setting up the physical scale in the Exp control.

 

regards

Bri

 

 

I'll give that a try. Thanks.

[Ky Lane]

Your problem is exposure.