MiikaHweb Blog -> Archive

Now that Google Summer of Code 2012 is almost over it's time for heavy testing and final improvements of my Blender smoke project.

This week I have been experimenting with different fire simulation and render setups to find out new ways to improve simulation quality. While testing out new code I also prepared three fire scenes for download so you can start playing with fire too without having to do days worth of experiments. :p

Check out the renders here:



Unfortunately there still isn't a single click "Make awesome fire!" button. Setting up realistic scene still takes lots of tweaking for both simulation and render. However simulating fire in general should be now much easier with these GSoC changes.

Burning Plane

This scene is an extreme example of texture controlled emission. A cloud texture with animated z-offset is used to generate additional turbulence to fire. This gives a huge visual improvement over a plane that emits fire evenly across whole surface.

Download: burning_plane.blend

Burning Sphere

The basic idea of this scene is very similar to previous one. However this time texture is tweaked with a color ramp to emit some fire even from darkest areas of the texture.

Download: burning_sphere.blend

Fire Pillar

This is a very basic scene I used to test high fuel/flame emitter. Notice how I have unticked "Absolute Density" checkbox from flow, making it "additive" instead. This way fuel can smoothly increase to very high amounts creating long lasting tall flames.

Download: fire_pillar.blend


Please note that to use these .blend files you need a Blender "soc-2012-fried_chicken" branch build of r49779 or later. All scenes are also quite heavy so it's better bake the cache. :)

Update: My smoke code has now been merged to Blender trunk. So any trunk revision of r51259 or later will do. :)