[UDK] Fire material

VFX
#1

Here is a short video of a fire material I’ve recently finished.

[video=vimeo;41496883]http://vimeo.com/41496883[/video]

Any thoughts and suggestions are welcome. :slight_smile:

#2

Hey Zoltan,
This looks pretty sweet! I like how you progressed from a candle, to a torch to a burning building… great progression.

The candle flame: Looks sweet. Is the shadow beneath the flame a sprite or the lighting? It looked off to me since it never really changed shape… although the movement was spot on.

The torch: I like the color and the ripple at the base of the torch, but the shape of the fire is a bit uniform. Can you take the ripple and have it follow up the torch side? Right now it looks like its using an edge depth to get the intersection. I’m guessing, so can you post the material network? I assume you’re using a UV deform and a ramp to control some of the strength of the falloff, and I would make it a little more aggressive to break up the shape of the fire.

The burning building: I like where this is going! Some of the fire is scrolling a little fast for the size of it, but its really good.

Adding a heat haze would help sell all of the heat of these flames.

Thanks for posting! These look great.

#3

Thanks Fhoop, I’m glad you liked it. :slight_smile:

The flame’s shadow is actually a shadow cast by a point light carried
by a random mover actor. It is low-res on purpose: at a bit higher
resolution the pixelation was quite visible, at very high shadow map
size the stuff looked like stencil shadows which I hate, so I settled
with a blurry one.

Torch: Right now it’s a distorted cylinder with a mask texture mapped
onto it so the start of the flame depends on the UVs. DepthBiasBlend
was not used in this case but it’s an optional part of the material. I
had it turned on at the burning box in the last scene.

By the way I intend to write a “behind the scenes” article at some
point where I’ll lay out the basic mechanics of the material.

#4

Here is the behind the scenes article:
http://www.zspline.net/blog/2012/06/21/fire-showcase-behind-the-scenes/

#5

Thanks for the article man, really helpful :slight_smile:

#6

sweet work man! that’s really awesome