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.