The model is just a displacement mapped sphere. .Blend will become available if I get enough responses. I find that it looks very good on Catboy’s horse rig:
It’s obviously not perfectly realistic yet- I’m going to try having fluid flame emit from the top of the objects on the z axis next.
Wow, very impressive!
I’m actually working on fire in blender myself, and I must say that your shader looks much better than mine!
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=102008
Great work! Keep it up! Have you tested this with animation yet? I’ll bet that would be very pretty!
-Chris
Thanks, magiciandude- your fire is coming along quite nicely as well. I actually did test the fireball in an animation. The youtube link will be up shortly. It’s only a rotating animation, but the shader looks alive during any kind of motion (the trick is a radial gradient alpha map in the reflection channel). I guess the real weakness is that when the fireball is stationary- I’ll see if I can get something similar by animating the displacement map instead.
Actually, I think I like your fire more. Mine is just eyecandy, but yours looks realistic for the most part. The problem is that I can’t get flames to come off of my objects, no matter what I try (the fluid sim idea didn’t work. At all.). Modeling the flames is the next step (or maybe I should displacement map them?)
+1 for the blend
… almost with an asskissing attitude:ba:
hey man this is awsome i really hope to see you make a tutorial on how to do this! 
Good 'nuff. Here you go:
Don’t forget to ask permission before commercial use. =)
I’d say you can try to use displacement for the flames, use a procedural texture with lots of contrast and one or more displacement modifiers.
Thank you for the suggestion, CD, I’ll try that next.
Only thing is, I wouldn’t recommend this technique for some volumetric fire, I made a test of fire coming from a pool of lava using a similar method. The only problem I saw was unless you take it into a paint program and blurred where the fire meets the other mesh you’ll get a harsh transition. To make it work best you’ll need to use it on an object without any intersections like your objects or hide the harsh transition.
a way to avoid this however would be the radial slices on the X, Y, and Z axis with a halo blend texture UVmapped on every face like I did with another test. You could just make a rough approximation of an object using a bunch of those sphere then.
Yeah, the problem with the transition is expected with any model protruding through another. Some strategic texturing of a single object can fix this, though I would have to stop using procedurals. It would be nice is there was a way to blur only the edges of an object in the comp nodes…
Now there’s an idea for a comp node, have a node where all the transitions of one object is blurred, so if you have fire using this techique having the object’s edges against another object blurred, it’ll look a bit better.
The second option would be to get a Jahka particle build and make your fire texture with the billboard option, since billboards are meshes and they all face the camera they should be detectable by raytracing. You’ll get better fire, but still may have a slight transition issue.
Out of all the things in Blender, I’ve never touched the particle system, and I would like to keep it that way. I don’t use raytracing anyway (buffered shadows are so much faster and reflections look better when they have a map). The billboard option wouldn’t look good anyway, as the fire tex is nearly invisible on a flat plain, which is because of the alpha map facing you in the ref channel.
very nice 
wonder why you dont like the particle system?
wwhy dont you upload the material to the blender material repository???
http://repository.parastudios.de/
WOW!!!
Those directx 10 tests are AMAZING!
I will definitely start playing around with the Perlin noise in Blender.
And sorry I haven’t been updating as often as I had hoped…but I have a bunch of other things to worry about at the moment…
Thanks for the replies and the suggestion!
-Chris
I think you meant to post that in your thread. 
very nice
wonder why you dont like the particle system?
wwhy dont you upload the material to the blender material repository???
http://repository.parastudios.de/
I guess it’s because I never took the time to look over that particular feature (it’s one of the few features in Blender I haven’t used yet). I’ll take a few tutorials once the new particle system is released for Blender 2.5.
Yes, I’ll upload it to the material repository as well. Thank you for the suggestion.
Your Idea is absolutely on fire! My horse has never looked so hot!
I’m glad you like it, Catboy. 