I posted a while ago to ask advice on making flames and just wanted to say thanks to all who replied with helpful suggestions. I only got around to doing it the other day, but here's the result. I already had the fireplace built, and I made the logs and flames as a separate figure to try it out, then integrated it into the fireplace, so it's now all one figure. The 4 logs and the flames are individual body parts and can be moved or scaled. I made the flames using 3 planes and applied tex/transmap to each one. The last improvement was adding a 'glow' to the fireplace. The inner stone has it's own material, so I set the Ambient Color to dark red. Gives a nice effect. I did the same with the 3 flames materials too. You can see the difference in the 2 top pics Thanks all mac

A good "glow" without changing the stone material, is another plane with a transmap. make your flames bright, with a fade to the plane edges to black. I just did a glow for a tinkerbell wand, and it came out quite nice! Now if I could get a handle on magnets, I'd be a happy puppy!

Nice looking fireplace- and Toon Gal DOES make a great looking Tinker Bell! (She looks like she's coming in for a crash-landing, however. I hope they have Foamed the runway!)

Yeppers.. a crash landing! ;) I'm still struggling with making her skirt do what I want.. it seems magnets are the only way to go for posing a mini skirt sorta thing, but I'll be damned if I can get the dress to do what I want, not what it wants! With mild posing, it's fine. bring the leg up like you see, and the dress "flaps" break into the leg mesh. I tried making a morph, but wasn't thinking that when you pose the figure, the mesh will deform, because it's conforming. Next guess is to export both the dress and the figure, and then try to make a morph of the dress based on that.

I take it you can animate the flames?

Mac, Just a small nitpicky bit.... If you can see flames like that, they are bright enough to cast the logs into silhouette. You wouldn't see the color/texture of the logs unless you were out in bright sunshine (a stronger light source than the flames). OK, a second nitpick, you are showing some bright yellow near the top of a couple of flames (left and right middle). The lightest brightest hottest area of the fire is at the base. Anything that high is probably orange to dark red. Now if you are animating fire and something like a piece of paper catches and lifts, you can get a hot spot like that rising... but we hope never to see such a thing in our fireplaces! HTH, Carolly

Garee, I didn't try a transmap on a plane, but I did try using a transmapped cylinder and cone. I preferred the effect of the ambient color. Beryl, Sorry. No animation. I can't imagine how flames could be animated. Run an avi on the panels? I have no idea. Carolly, The logs wouldn't neccessarily be in silhouette if the room were well lit. I have a log fire right next to me and I can see the logs pretty well. I take the point though. With dim lighting, they would be in silhouette. In fact, in these pics, the light is pointing right at the fire. I'm still messing with the flame textures and I've remapped the flame body part so that all 3 panels take the same size tex and are therefore, interchangable. So you'd be able to switch them around. Actually, the hotter something is, the redder it is. Yellow is the color of faster-burning materials like paper or the bark of logs, so it's not unnatural to have yellow flames on the logs, since the bark burns yellow. Maybe higher up isn't so good though. I'm still fine-tuning it, so thanks to all for the comments. mac

I was thinking on the line, if the flames are body groups, you should be able to animate. Resizing and moveing them around. You might try a little blue and or green close to the logs. Watch a log burn and you will see what I mean.

Hi beryl, Now I understand what you mean. Well, the flames are one body group, so they'd all scale and move together. I don't think it's a good idea to split them into 3 groups because the figure already has a lot of body parts. I've remapped so all 3 panels take the same size tex (even tough the panels are different sizes), so the texs are now interchangable, and I'm experimenting with the transmaps and texs. Will try some green and blue. mac

Forgot to say, the blue/green will start under the logs and work up. Something to do with the way the gases are released. I do a lot of camping, love stream fishing, so I notice how campfires look. Not much to do at night but drink beer and play with fire. Oh, and good fish stories. LOL.