Animating/rendering fire -- what do you do?

[davision]

I need to do some pretty serious fire work. I've done it in the past with Pflow but it looks somewhat mediocre.

What are you people doing to create good fire, flame effects? I'm not looking for explosions exactly -- for that I'd use afterburn. I'm looking for something like a raging bonfire, car fire or housefire, etc.

I guess the solution could also be through Aftereffects not just max.

Any suggestions?

[instinct]

FumeFX (and krakatoa for sparks but that's a tad expensive if you only get it for the sparks :P )

Here's two fume examples:

http://vimeo.com/3364586

http://vimeo.com/5784484

Regards,
Thorsten

[PixelJockey]

Could try Blender fire and comp?

http://www.blendernation.com/blender...lation-update/

[davision]

Thank you for those suggestions. I've heard about fume -- and it definitely looks nice. But I heard it's very slow. Any comments on that?

[instinct]

well. that'S pretty relative and hard to put into numbers. You are looking to create a VERY VERY complex effect in 3d. of course that isnt something that is as fast as firing a bunch of SuperSpray particles. With a bit of care and some practice you can get pretty decent results without too much hassle.

Or even create a bunch of reusable fire assets like "fire out of window" or "burning box" that can be reused and hence dont have to be re-simulated.

Regards,
Thorsten

[davision]

How's the render time once the sim is done?

Is it friendly with Vray? I'm not worried about GI and such -- just rendering a Vray scene with pretty basic lighting.

[instinct]

Depends on the scene but rather quick i'd say. It is VRay friendly and can also create GI in VRay.

Regards,
Thorsten

[Paul Oblomov]

Have troubles with exponential color mapping and physcam. Reinhard works pretty much good. But still autodesk atmosphere part clamps output, so ur fire won't be very bright. Always slightly above 1.0 (let's say 1.1-1.2).

Anyway you can use atmosphere render element... that don't care about reflection