Fire VFX Project (Fullsail)

For this project I wanted to replicate the fire from a grill from which lighter fluid was put on the fire. The first thing I did was to model the grill and coals for the fire to emit from. Once it was all done, I made my coals emitters for the fluid/fire. After adjusting my scale and resolution of the 3d container, I used the fire that I was making in lecture as a base point for what my fire should be. I then tried to make where I had no boundaries for my container, but it never seemed to work. I then applied collisions to me grill in order to stop the fire from penetrating the geometry. Once I got the fire to stop going through my grill. I began to make fixes to my fire. I added a tiny bit of turbulence, reduced my density, added buoyancy, and got more swirl. I did one more thing and that was adjusting the dissipation. For dissipation, I couldn’t use a constant value because I wanted my fire to erupt and eventually simmer down. So in order for this to work I keyed my dissipation in order to get this effect. I also keyed the pressure for the temperature in order to get a bigger explosion at the beginning of the movie. Once all that was complete. I went to the color section in order to give my fire a more realistic feel to it. Since my reference was a clean fire, meant that there was going to be little smoke. For the color I adjusted it to so that the fire would appear mostly yellow with orange and read around the edges, until the fire began to calm down and evenly spread out the colors. I was pretty much done with my fire except for the lights, and a small error with the way my fire came out of the grill. The error was that my fire was coming out vertically from my grill so it looked like there were gaps in my fire for certain angles. I tried putting multiple fields on it, like drag, air, turbulence, and a vortex field, but nothing seemed to want to interact with each other. For my light I made a point light for the fire and a directional light just to light the scene. The point light was put on a quadratic Decay rate, an orange tint, and was given the expression:

 (if (time > .6) pointLightShape1.intensity = rand(300,700);)

(if (time < .6) pointLightShape1.intensity = rand(209,400);)

This was necessary because I needed to light the fire and make it look like it was flickering on and off. Lastly I animated the camera in order to show off the grill fire, and cached out the fluid in order to render it faster.

I think it turned out a lot better than I thought it would turn out. And for my first fire it look pretty good. I wanted to take it in to Houdini but I’m not that familiar with Houndini and I ran out of time in order to render it out.