Creating Fire

For the final part of this scene, I have been making a small fire, which will eventually spread and grow bigger in the next scene. A super spray has been used again, but with slightly different settings to the smoke. Mesh particles have been used again so that it can be seen what the fire looks like and for the particles to be facing. I have changed all of the paticles on my other super sprays to facing because no matter how you look at the super spray, you will always be able to see the fire particles as they were meant to be.

The rotation and collision drop-down in the modify panel has had its settings slightly changed for the fire. Although I originally used an online tutorial to create smoke and to generally get the settings needed for the super spray, through making smoke a couple of times I have learnt what the settings are and how they effect the spray. So now that I am creating the fire, I have managed to guess by looking at the settings what digits roughly I need to input to get the desired effect.

For the rotation and collision tab, the variation option is particularly useful for fire. When playing through the fire on the timeline, each time the particles move and change, they never do so in exactly the same way, just like real fire. The particles also spin in 180 desgrees, once again adding realism to the fire.

The frame settings have been adjusted so that the fire starts growing when the smoke has been growing for a few frames, then it suddenly grows bigger and brighter. The amount of frames it grows for should be about 20, but this may be changed later, as well as when the fire ends.

To create the material for the fire, a face map and gradient has been used. This allows for multiple colours to be shown in the fire. Orange and yellow have been used because although many people think that fires have red parts, you can never really see red in a flame.

The texture has had it's glossiness decreased and its opacity increased and the diffuse colour changed. The diffuse setting has been set slightly higher as well.

The gradient type has also been adjusted to radial and noise has been added to make the fire look more realistic. These settings make the particles look more vivid and separated, instead of just a chunk of particles put together. Like when noise was added to the floor texture, the texture itself looks more rough and 3D.

Here is the final result of the fire when it gets going. It can be seen how the particles have been adjusted so that it looks more like the burning embers of a fire, compared to the smoke where the particles are more transparent and merge together.