Playing With Fire

Adding more special effects to my arsenal, Studio Projects Dynamics moves onto creating and controlling fire (using Maya fluids). Using fire is something which will be particularly relevant to a side-project I am currently involved in, and one of the tutorials involves burning down a 3D model of a house, which hopefully will be useful.

Starting off slowly, the first example introduces using fuel and heat within a fluid container. As this is not particularly exciting by itself, there is not much to show, so below we can see the second example - a simple flame created entirely in CG;

After working with a simple flame, a preset was created, and then imported into a new scene featuring a simple house model (provided on the tutorial disc). The flames were scaled up and tweaked to suit the new size. The house structure was already broken in segments, so these were converted to nCloth components, ready for destruction. Randomness was applied to the building 'burning down' by using keyframed ramp shaders with noise applied. The finished render can be seen below;

This chapter was one of the most important topics I have covered so far (and very relevant to the side-project) which allows me to transfer the skills learned during this tutorial, and apply them in a more creative manner.