hi,
i have this nice flame that i made in blender. i used RVK to animate it the way that i want it to look. its nice.
now comes the part with which i need help, how can i make it so that the fire illuminates the surroundings??? and that that light also refracts from some ice blocks that are in front of the fire? (its blue fire)
does anyone has any ideas?
*maybe someone has a better way of animating fire, that would also be great!
you could parent lights to several vertices of your mesh and that way the light would move with those points.
you could try using a new particle system(use far less particles) with dupilverts, and reaaaaaaaaaaaaly dark lights (energy : .001? depends on amount of particle lamps) might add up to a nice flickering effect.
Hmm - Sounds like you’re talking about Radiosity - the ability of a mesh to impart and receive light to / from it’s surroundings.
Check the Blender docs for Radiosity, you may well find your answer there.
Radiosity would be really slow, and animated radiosity isn’t something I’d ever recommend. :o
There is always using Yafray GI. That causes colors to bleed around, but the amount of bleeding probably isn’t what you had in mind. The simplest thing, I think, would be to simply add a bit of dull reflection to the surfaces on which you’d want the fire to reflect and be careful with camera angles.
I’d try what Coalth said. I’ve used it with good results before.
DwarvenFury
Good point - Shows I need sleep!
I’ve seen something in a thread here in the last week or so about cheating radiosity by layering a texture with a sphere blend with white opaque in the centre and black transparent at the edge over the material to shine on, then object mapping the texture to the glowing object.
Hang on…
Here it is: https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=59591
its amazing, ( at least the still), ill post an image of it when i get to work on it again, i now have exams and not much time for blender. this really makes me sad:( but once i have time, ill post an image and u all can see how it turned out:)
Dupliverted lamps is a good solution.
If you’re doing an animation, I would recommend making two identical particle systems, except one of them with a much smaller particle count. Duplivert a lamp to the one with fewer particles. It will speed up your render time considerably, and if you tweak it right will have very little impact on quality.
I’d just do it like they do in the movies: put a lamp there (you can’t see a Magic CG-Lamp, after all…) and modulate its color and intensity convincingly with an IPO.
Since the viewer “knows” that a fire emits light, that’s what he’ll “see.” There can be a considerable difference between what would be the case in the real-world and what you describe to a computer program, and when all the dust finally settles (so to speak…) it makes not one dram bit of difference. If what you come up with looks good (enough), and in this case it will, then “ship it.”
Be careful that you know when to stop: to know when what you have come up with is good enough to carry the desired illusion. Remember that the viewer has a lifetime of experience with campfires, and as long as you are careful not to contradict the illusion, his experience will contribute to what he actually “sees.” You don’t need to make anything “perfect.”