Creating light source to emulate off screen camp fire

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi all, I’m extremely new to blender, so far I’ve spent one day learning the basics and as a starter project I’m creating an intro for my youtube channel.

So far the intro is looking pretty decent but I think its missing something, I want dim the lighting, turn down the emitted light on the background and the spinning logo and replace my light source with a light source that is supposed to look like there’s a roaring campfire just below the logo off screen.

My understanding of the problem is I need to create a light source that flickers at a fairly low frequency and shifts colour at random between colours appropriate for flame (orange, red, yellow etc). I may then need to duplicate this light source a few times and have its direction animate so that it shifts left and right at random.

Once I’ve done that I plan on adding small embers drifting up from the bottom of the screen and fading into nothing, some subtle wispy smoke rising up and dispersing and some subtle crackling sound effects for good measure :slight_smile: (these are things I’ll look into myself after I get the light source working).

I’ve tried googling for tutorials on how to do things like this and the problem is that everyone seems to want to render on screen fire that lights up objects nearby which is a lot more than I need to do. Can anyone point me in the right direction please?

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Hey Youngwolf0! To animate the colors and lighting and flickering of the fire, you can checkout my tutorial on animating values here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPi3v7JlRkY

Then to make a fire out of the camera that just lights the scene without getting too technical, You could definitely just use a light source or I could suggest having some planes with the emitter material and adding a cloth simulator on it with a wind vortex at the bottom of it. This way it creates a fire kind of like those fake waving cloth fires that you see in real life. You can follow my tutorial on making a waving flag and using the same concept to create several waving fire flames and creating a “Fake Fire” that way that gives you some animation. Hope that gives you some ideas :slight_smile:

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I’ll take a look at this at some point in the next week when I get time. I don’t need the fire to be visible so it will just be the light source settings I’ll be playing with. Thanks for the info :slight_smile: