I’m currently working on way to get a fire simulation as realistic as it can get. The biggest problem right now is to get a light from the fire. I saw a lot of people faking it with a normal light object and some noise in the graph editor as energy, but this is not really realistic. The fire gets emitted on a plane inside a room next to an open window and parts of the fire go through the window, so the wall should be lighten up by it. A light setup would be almost impossible to use.
I already asked some people, but couldn’t get a solution by now. Someone said indirect lightning could solve the problem, but how excactly would that work?
I tested different renderer for Blender 2.5, but none worked for me. Some didn’t even worked at all, but even if they did, I couldn’t get the smoke simulation running.
If anyone has an idea please let me know. Worst thing that can happen is, that the idea won’t work, but that’s still better than no idea at all
What about other render engines? I’m testing vray right now, but have to figure it out first. In the blender irc channel someone had the idea to use the alpha channel on the fire texture as source for the energy value on a lamp. It sounds like a good idea, but on a second thought it shouldn’t work, because the light wouldn’t flicker, would it? And I would still need more than one lamp, because the fire “moves” out of the window… A lot of work for nothing, I guess. What about the heat or density information of every cell inside the domain? Can someone make it usable? Maybe even fake a lamp inside every cell?! It would still be a fake, but I don’t even know how it could be “realistic” in a 3D program. Let’s just say: I don’t care if it’s fake or not, if it looks real And is faking the light with a lamp the most realistic Blender 2.5 can do right now, or is there another way, thats not really practical, but would look better?
I tested a lot of different render engines for Blender 2.5 now. None worked as I hoped.
The installation took me several hours and the end result was quite bad. V-Ray made some nice pictures, but in the end it wasn’t able to make smoke. I think I will focus on yafaray for now, but to get the fire as a light source I guess I’ll have to wait until it’s integrated in Blender or at least until Blender is finished and other people start building more complex stuff for it.
Till then I hope to get some usefull tips or tricks to work around the problem
