Bonfire Tutorial

(Creating Smoke with Particles)

By

Pat Connelly

I would really like to take complete credit for this tutorial.  However, what prompted this tutorial is Mikael Johannesen's mpeg of smoke using particles.  Mikael posted a link to a nice mpeg of smoke/fire.  He gladly zipped up his entire project and allowed me to examine it.  The link is particle4project.ZIP .  So.... after taking apart his project, I now have his formula (slightly modified) for making smoke.  I needed some sort of source for the smoke so the bonfire below is mine.  My own mpeg animation is 322 kb.

There are basically two components to this animation - smoke and fire.  The smoke is composed of one particle object which is a fog object.  It has 2 textures - ghost and linear fogtop.  It is animated using the particle effect in the stage editor.   The fire is a plane with the fire texture bent into a tapered cylinder.  There is a disc forming the base of the fire and a few simple logs (black cylinders) to complete the picture.

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