How to Make a Simple Bonfire

By

Pat Connelly

Making and animating fire is quite simple using the fire texture.  However, this texture only applies well to a plane.  So.... I will apply it to a plane, make a state, and then shape the plane into a tapered cylinder which is my desired fire object. 

The plane is 360 wide by 100 tall.  This ratio allows easy conversion to a sphere or anything else.  I used the standard conform to a cylinder with the default values of 50 and 160 which gave me a nice intact cylinder.  I then tapered the cylinder manually to finalize my object shape.

The final tapered cylinder is to the left.  The attribute settings are default except for the application of the fire fade texture.  The settings for the fire texture are default.  However, I needed a different axis placing and sizing to get my flames adjusted.  The axis placement is shown below on the right.  Also, I needed two states to morph the time adjust parameter from 0 to 1 so the flames will flicker.   The fire plane rendered is shown below on the left.  The y axis controls the height of the flames.  Also the object is a bright object.

The fire looked a little hollow so I needed a fire base.  I used a disc with two textures -  fractal bump and Essence blobc.    Default settings are used for both with the color a pure yellow for blobc.   The other object setting include the base color as seen below.  Other attributes have the default values.

The last object needed was few sticks, logs, branches, whatever... to burn within the fire.  The objects are simple black cylinders.   One cylinder was made, copied, and rotated to achieve the pile below.  Now my fire is complete.

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