My attempt at making realistic fire without composite nodes or special Blender builds.
I tried modeling one flame, and having it act in place of the particles in a system.
Here is what I eventually got.
Vimeo- http://vimeo.com/1655834
You can probably see that the flames just blink in and out.I would like them to fade in and out individually, but I honestly can’t come up with anything to make that happen.
You could trying adding an Alpha IPO to the flame object. To add so more randomness to the flames, you could have several different flame objects in a group and then use Group instead of Object for your visualization.
Can’t watch the video 
Tried adding the material ipo. It made the entire object fade in and out. I think that was because the ipo was affecting the one material, and then being sent to the object instances. Still kinda perplexed on how to go about that.
use the partical IPO to scale them to zero.
You should add vector blur to this and you’ll get good results.
You’d add a vector blur through nodes, right?
Hey,
I’ve been following this thread for a while and I must say… Not much progress…
So I started developing my own blur + glow set up…
Everything is achieved by composite nodes.
This is the set up:
As you see it is not a complicated set up… Rather simple really…
For additional info… well all you really need to know is how to lower or higher the blur effect. That can be done by changing the X and Y Values on the Blur node.
The blend file is attached for you to test out.
Comments appreciated.
Have fun with it!
Fort Ash
TheBlur.blend (415 KB)
Why would you do this without nodes?
