During the “olympic flame” Elysiun theme weekend challenge I posted a blend file of the fire material (which is still available), and some people found that useful.
While in animation mode tonight, I decided to try making it come alive and be useful for animation purposes. The results weren’t perfect, but they seemed notable enough to post here as long as it was made clear this would likely need to be further tweaked if it were to be incorporated into any project.
As you’ll see in the blend, I worked some more on the textures and have a number of editable IPO curves controlling various aspects of the fire for each mesh (check under texture and material IPOs) as well as the special lights further described below.
Wave effects are respectively applied to individual flame meshes. You can edit the effect speed and other variables too of the wave effect depending on what you want.
Also there are two low distance lights that dart around the front and back of the flame in a seemingly erratic cyclical fashion. These too can be edited so as to both affect the flame intensity and to throw off variably powered flickering light. Set power through IPO curve edits.
Behind the flame to the right you’ll see a simple wall (a plane) with a norry texture. This is there simply to demonstrate how the flame, when combined with the two special lights, can be made to look as if it is casting dynamic illumination.
Download and use the blend however you want. Experiment with different settings, speeds, and so on. Try stacking up modified meshes with edited IPOs and see what kinds of results you get. The main thing here is experiment to see what works best!
The blend is preset to render an animated demonstration. Just click the Animation button, wait until it renders, then click Play It’s 100 frames long and renders relatively fast.
cant you upload a animation? I’m at work now and I have no blender installation. I’d love to see this… + some screenies. I guess that’d be lot easier for everyone to see what they’re actually downloading
I have to watch my bandwidth (I just posted in another thread a 1.4mb animation).
Just hit F12 to preview one frame to get a vague idea of its potential whenever you get the chance. As I was saying, this is meant to be further customized for optimal results.
It’s a very small download (~50k) and takes less than 15 minutes to render on a 2.4ghz system.
So glad you found it useful Antiggo I hope others do too.
I should be okay right now hosting just the blend file (not the actual demo animation), since it’s such a small file. I do anticipate posting some more projects, so I need to budget space and bw for all that good stuff
i think the fire flicker and color is pretty darn good, but the animated texture itself still needs some tuning to be perfect, but very good fire none the less.
GCat: You’re most welcome Yes, it was educational for me in terms of working with so many differnet IPOs for one object. Hopefully others can learn from what’s visible in the blend file too.
Hippie: Thanks! Yes, it definitely needs to be tweaked to subjective perfection One of the several IPOs in the blend file affect the texture noise, so a different procedural texture/depth and material settings could lead to all sorts of interesting results. The main goal was to create something that could render extremely fast yet look fairly realistic and dynamic in either a static render or in an animation.
It’s 100 frames long and renders relatively fast.
I hope others do too.