Extending the Burning Chair tutorial - suggested approach

[stelees]

Hey there,

I was just after some help with how to do what I think is amazing in my head. I worked through the burning chair tutorial which was an interesting way to see the vertex colour being used, but what if I want that to grow.

I remember seeing a FumeFX tutorial ages ago using vertex paint on stairs and then particle flow to control the fume particle source so the fire spread along the staircase and up the wall. I was wondering how to replicate that sort of effect with Phoenix. I made a basic staircase in max, subdivided it and painted where the fire would go up the stairs and spread up the walls. Using the same approach as the burning chair the fire just appears anywhere that I have the white areas. What I could like to do is control the spread from the bottom up and around the staircase, but I am not clear on how to do this with Phoenix more so, just controlling the growth of the texture to allow it to 'spread' up the stairs.

Thanks for any suggestions and apologies if this is a forehead slapping, wow this is a really easy one solution.

S.

[georgi.zhekov]

Hey,

You could use the vertex map to spawn some pflow particles and then with the Group selection operator you can get only the particles that are inside of a pflow helper or a dummy geometry. This way you can animate the helper an activate the particles.
Then you send out those activated particles to a new event and use that for the Phoenix emission.

You can check how this works in the attached example file.

[stelees]

Thank you very much, I will pull this apart and work through it from there. Greatly appreciated.

S.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Btw, while we were thinking about this yesterday, we made the connection with this post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/stac...58580007821828

It uses Shape Map in order to get the procedural moving map. Maybe this approach could also be useful

Cheers!

[stelees]

oohh that is really interesting. I always struggle with PF as the source for a Phoenix effect as getting the right amount of particles as the trigger the right amount of fire and not kill my machine unnecessarily and the like. I'll have a look at this approach, thanks for the tip.

[stelees]

Actually one last thing and this is just my pflow dumbness. When the object collides it spawns once then disperses, so the fire doesn't stay. I put a collision spawn in place against a deflector, but it still just spawns then disperses - what trick do I need in order to keep the particles emitting for a few seconds to allow flames to build?

[stelees]

Never mind.. added a spawn in the middle before the display.. duh!