Fire 03

It has been nearlt 2 weeks that I try to find out the perfect way to make flames. The pitch will be in couple of days now, so me and our team are eager to see the positive outcome from me. To tell the truth, I think I succeeded to make fair quality of flame.

I found the tutorial making candle light with softbody. Then I thought softbody wouldn't take too long to render since it isn't fluid and also the colour is from the object not particle itself. If I make the flame with softbody and glowness with the fire that I made earlier in Fire 01, it could be quiet convincing.

So I made an flame shape of nurbs object, and turned it into a softbody. I fully followed this tutorial. I linked a turbulence field to the softbody after I added 'spring' to the softbody, and I played animation and the flame was so.. abnormal.

So I linked a drag field to hold the object. I thought maybe the turbulence field could be the problem, affecting the force to around the object. I changed the attribute as cone shaped volume so it can only affects to the overlapped part of the object.

Now the overlapped part of the object looks like melting down along side of the volume area.
I increased the stiffness in the spring attributes.

and the result was..

 Even I increased magnitude of turbulence, it didn't even get shaken or moved anything. It just melted down.

I almost gave up making individual flames after continuous failing. As reading through the tutorial again, I realised the only stage that the object acts funny will be when I added spring to the object. Before hand, all i did was making nurbs object to softbody. So I started up new scene and skipped the adding spring and it worked so well! I finally succeeded to make a flame and it was perfectly moved by the fields.

 softbody flame + particle fire

Final render for the pitch




I'm so glad I could finish it before the pitch. I never thought it would be that difficult to make gas stove fire before I failed so many times. However, I could learn how to distinct which will be effective way for the scene and which won't. Plus it was a good experience that I could experiment so many various ways to create one asset. The result in this post isn't the final one for the film but I personally think I achieved 70% of job for the completion.

Fire 02

I wasn't happy with the default fire in maya dynamics. I needed more organic and subtle type of flame. It could get away f it showed only a bit during the short time in the scene. However, the dynamics in our project takes huge part. It should be perfect and even it was only experimentation, I want it to reach at least 70% of final quality.

So I spent days and days to research to make perfect flame. I found some examples on the youtube but those were made with very heavy methods like maya Fluids, Smoke, Houdini etc. I am interested in houdini anyway so I tried to see how it looks.

 

This image is the screenshot of houdini. I only set up the default pyroflame. I didn't modify any numbers, apply any nodes. It was the most basic fire that anyone can make. The quality of fire on the test render looked good but it looked slightly too much but I thought it would be suit for our scene after some twig. But I HAVE TO turn it down. I rendered 250 frames and it took SO MUCH time to render. I had to stop right after it rendered 75 frames after 2 hours. It wouldn't be worked if it took that much time to render. Also we need at least more than 10 flames around the ring that emitting gas.

After the attempt for houdini, I tried to see what maya Fluid fire would look like. Like the pyroflame, I imported a fluid flame from maya internal library. Again, it took TOO much time to render.

 After failing few times now, I'm getting more anticipate to find way to make decent looking flame but can be rendered relatively quicker than fluid and pyro flame..

Fire 01

So, I started to make fire for the gas stove first. I used the basic fire option in dynamics menu in maya.
With the model Arpit sent earlier, I created a nurbs cylinder as surface emitter, placed it where the flames come out on the stove and hid it. Below image is the screenshot of first animation.

The colour is set as the default so I played around with colour, transparency, and incandescence.

1) Colour - I set the ramp of colour that I want the flame would look like in final outcome.

2) Transparency 

Default setting for Transparency

I wanted to make the fire starts with transparent blue and ends with a hint of orange but it didn't work very well. I didn't really like the transition when blue becomes to orange. It got too bright in the middle which doesn't look organic.

3) Incandescence

Default setting for Incandescence

Playing around with incandescence was very tricky because when I change little bit of colour, it directly affects to the flame colour and glow.



So the first attempt to creating fire wasn't very swell. Also I thought the fire is too blobby and moving too much when the real gas stove fire looks smoothly comes out and more stands still.

I played around with blob map option under the transparency tab, and the result was getting more horrible.. The blob map is worked by a texture map which I have never used before and I found it's really difficult to control. I got the sense it makes blurry depends on the shaker value of the texture map but it didn't really help for whole look of flame.

At this stage, fire looked too flat whereas I wanted to make flames look transparent  in the middle and getting coloured as it reaches to the edge. After few research, I found the Translucence might can help with this issue.

HOWEVER, despite my expectation, translucence couldn't help it like above screenshot. I reckon translucence would be useful when it's applied to solid object, but it didn't work properly this time cause the fire glows itself. I was getting tired..

Then I started to modify figures of fireshape, reducing the glow, try to make fire solid and lower the height etc.

Fire so far with default Goal UV setting

changed Fire Scale 1.0 to 1.5

Reduced the Fire Speed to make it more stable so that it doesn't look too blobby

Increased Fire Lifespan that particles can stay longer for the same reason as above. Less blobby.

To sort out the height issue of flame, I applied drag field to the fire. As increasing the magnitude of drag field, the fire came down to right level. I also applied turbulence field to give a little sense of shaking by emitting gas from the inside of stove. After modifying many figures, it now has more subtle look.

 

 

Fire reference

As we have to present our formative pitch on 24th Novemeber, Valentino asked me to make fire and steam for kitchen scene. So I started to find some references. I have recorded different types of flame.

1) the stove flames

2) lighter flame

3) Candle light

 The main aspect of flames from stove is that there are each individual flames are coming from the holes, and you can see the glow around the flames. Also the emitting point of colour is fairly transparent, the side edge is blue and top of the flame appears a hint of orange.