How do I create a realistic localilzed room burn propagating to flashover/flameover

[SAFETY_ENGINEERING]

I recently purchased the Phoenix FD software and I’ve been practicing with the included tutorials and looking at YouTube videos of demonstrations. I still find myself having a difficult time creating realistic an electrical fire starting from wiring inside the wall; then propagating out and up the wall spreading while blacking items in its path (i.e., walls & flooring) and finally ending with the room going to flash over (fire spread across ceiling to floor and along walls). I have been unable to find any tutorials, FAQs or people on your forums discussing or asking how to create this type of real world fire characteristics.

I am familiar with the Phoenix brand. I have several old copies that I purchased way back when Digimation, Inc. & Chaos own the brand. It was simple to generate the flash over and flame over effect with fire traveling up and spreading across walls. Back then I use to create the geometry attach an atmospheric apparatus from Phoenix as a fire emitter. The emitter would create vector fire splines indicating in the viewport what the fire would look like and that was it. As I manipulated the atmospheric apparatus the fire vector splines would spread out and up the wall as I increase the atmospheric apparatus size. The fire always appeared as if it was actually on the wall surface (instead of the torch effect that I’m still getting). The fire would started from within the wall (using a small atmospheric apparatus) and would simulate burning through (by moving the atmospheric apparatus through the geometry surface) and the spreading out and up the wall (by scaling the atmospheric apparatus) creating nice “V” patterns. The blacking effect was achieved by using the “Chameleon” software and “Chameleon atmospheric apparatus”.

I appreciate you looking in to my Phoenix FD dilemma. All I’m looking forward to is as follows:
1.) Please inform me if the desired effect I’m trying to generate is possible with the new Phoenix FD software.
2.) If it is possible to do, how can I create the type of fire simulation (flashover & flameover) conditions I replicated with the old 2001 version of the software I discussed above. How do I get the fire dynamic to behave like real world fire starting in a small localize area inside the wall and as it encounters more flammable items burn through the wall and spread up and out across the wall; then travel along the ceiling and finally across floor (carpet burning) .

Once again thank you and your efforts are greatly appreciated.

[Ivaylo Katev]

Hi,
you can use two ways to achive propagating fire
- Create animated texture and use it to modulate the fire source. As texture you can use big sized noise, with animated threshold. No need to use fuel, just hot gas will be enough.
- Init the fuel content of the grid to form the path that the fire have to travel, and provide some small hot source in the point of ignition. You can use mapped initialisation or script, what you prefer.
The blacking can be made dragging particles and stopping them on collision with some geometry + particle texture for the visualisation

Regards,
Ivo

[Teriander]

Has this changed since 2.0 ? I noticed in the "Fuel" tab there is Energy, Ignition, and Propagation. Can this be used to spread fire?

[Ivaylo Katev]

yes it can be used, however is less controllable then the animated texture.