I made the fire out of cones, as you all can see. I think it works okay for the 2 in the distance, but not the one in front. Suggestions?

Yep... Make a Fire out of Metaballs then Group them all together...?

So this is with metaballs...still not very natural, but better

Try changeing the Phase and Noise and Maybe Multiply the settings by 50%...Maybe try Random Mapping Mode...?

Changed the phase and noise..now the shape is odd... Never dared fiddling with shape and noise before (very very newbie)

Add More MetaBalls and go Back to a Cubic or World Mapping...? I am off to work will be back later... Go and Get Bauments Fire from his site and Ungroup and add Clays frie to the Flames then Regroup the Flames as a group then group the whole Fire again...

I would suggest using several cones of varying height and size. Also, to improve this you could put a light in the fire and add some smoke. Good luck

I like the first one best. Agree with Nicko about the light and smoke.

I like the first one best too, also, I would make the ones in the distance small, they look the same size..making them smaller would make it more realistic showing them in the distance.

Oh wow, Nice idea! I love playing with fire. (off to play with fire)

Hmm... my way is to use postwork. I put Clay's fire on a sphere because the colors are great for it. I then render, save, and go to Paint Shop Pro (should work in Photoshop too) and use the smudge tool set to about 75% opacity I think and fairly small. I smudge outwards and upwards as you can see in my pic (that's from one of my gallery images). I also added some smoke on another layer; in fact it's probably best if you put the whole thing on a separate layer using masks. Then you brighten it (on suggestion from lordstormdragon, thanks there my friend) and increase the contrast (I used +30% brightness and +56% contrast), and there you have it. I was to lazy to do this last part in my actual image, did it just now for this and it looks 200% better (go look at my original image if you don't believe me). Doesn't look exactly photorealistic but maybe if you played around a bit you could get better results 8-) good luck!

As stated before, a good trick is to use multiple primitives with a fire mat applied. I use about 7 primitives (spheres and cylinders). Each one is the same mat (clay's fire), but each one has various levels of density, fuzziness, quality, etc. Also, the primitives are all various sizes. Basically, smaller primitives with denser, less soft/fuzzy mats on the inside. As I go out, the primitives get larger, and the mats will get less dense, and more soft/fuzzy. This is a very old study I was doing with and without smoke for a wall mounted torch. AS

shinyary2, Oh, please, do post your final image, I'd love to see what the whole thing looks like now. Pretty please? I hope you didn't mind me 'borrowing' your idea for playing with fire, I've had such fun with it. But I really like that darker smokey effect you have, please let us see? Fran

AS, Density, quality and fuzziness - oh, I never thought to play with that! Thanks AS.

shinyary2... "Doesn't look exactly photorealistic but maybe if you played around a bit you could get better results" I disagree, your process looks VERY nice. To have a good lit torch reference I threw in some midevil movie DVD into the player and looked at their torches on pause. Fire looks WAY less dramatic when paused. WAY less. AS

Well... thanks. Seeing as how I usually have a bit of time between images (all of two days! =P) I'll consider reposting the better one. Maybe I'll try to improve it somewhat; I was happy with it at the time but now I look back and it's "augh!! What was I thinking!?!?" Not that my current images are that much better, lol. Thanks

Thanks to all of you for your advice! I really have to learn to do postworking some day - hopefully The Gimp will do... I'll play around with the fire and probably ask for help again :)

shinyary2, Oo, ooh yeah... when, when? (jumping up & down in excitment) gg

ek-art, ooops, it was YOUR idea I started playing with, geeze I hope you didn't mind? It was such a nice idea, I just couldn't resist. And when are YOU posting your wip in it's current state? I'd like to see how it's progressing. BTW, are you using dishes for the distant fires, or is it just cones of fire? What is going to happen next in your image? Will there be people? Temples?? what? I'm dying to know, so do tell. Fran

Fran, Don't mind you playing with "my" idea, just happy to bring inspiration of any kind :) Distant fires are cones too - until I get it right. No people - I don't have Poser and trashed Studio as it didn't work after several downloads and reinstalls... A temple, hmm, already thought about that! But progressing is slow... tried out the metaball trick. Last night I was spoon-fed by Xenic101 for hours and my fire still didn't look like his. Today I tried the technique AS described earlier in the thread, but I can see the edges of the spheres and that's not nice at all. Tried to make a fire from a Brycetech tut, and it won't render :( So at the moment I'm kinda lost... Will post whenever I make any progress at all (if I do)

ek-art, Fires do seem to be tricky, don't they? I thought I had that one sussed, until I did a render at higher resolution and that's when the little lines appeared. "Distant fires are cones too - until I get it right." Yeah, cones for the fires, but are the distant fires sitting in dishes or are the fires just... there? I mean I can't SEE the distant dishes so I wondered if they were actually there, but just out of sight or just left to the imagination of the viewers? I was wondering because I'm inclined to put in detail like that and then wonder later if I shouldn't take it out, when it can't actually be seen, to reduce the size of the bryce file... Fran

Fran, The distant fires are just cones with a fire material - not sitting in anything, just lowered into the terrain.. not too professional, I'm afraid ;) they don't look too bad at a distance, I think. The haze covers up the fact that it's only cones, though the size isn't right. I had one more to start with, further away, but it didn't show so I deleted it. Btw, I'm so impressed with your fire! This is my first attempt and yes! VERY tricky...(just about to give up)

My fire is probably way more complex than yours - I got rather carried away and just kept adding metaballs, spheres, cones, cylinders, spheres, metaballs, metaballs oh yes - and spheres! gg It's a real wireframe mess in there by now, but so long as I don't mess up the (totally accidental) face in the flames, the nice blue fire effects and can get rid of the nasty dotted lines - I MAY end up happy... (doubtful expression) I have just the one radial light in there at the moment but people have mentioned multiple lights, so if I can stand all the waiting (days probably!) while a tiny bit renders for me to check progress, I may even add more little radials... It's a good job the campfire is burning at night - hides any imperfections (lots!) in the rest of the landscape. (snigger)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=947846&Start=1&Sectionid=2&filter_genre_id=0&

Okay, here it is. I don't usually do reposts, but since you asked so nicely... =) I also fixed a few other things besides the fire. Thanks to the Storm Dragon for his excellent advice. Cheers

That's great, thanks. I like all of it... the fire being particularly good. Just one query. Are those birds or aircraft in the sky in the centre of the image? If air craft, then fine... but if birds... Well it just looks odd for every bird to be flying in the exact same direction. Are they aircraft?

Hehe no they're supposed to be bats. They were entirely postwork, literally thrown in at the last moment for no real reason. This is another part of the image that falls under the "Augh! What was I thinking?!?!" category (all modifications for the better version were made in postwork). So, no, they're not aircraft, lol =) Cheers

Well actually I did wonder about bats, fits the mood better. You might need one a bit closer to the camera so you can more easily see just what it is. Just IMO. I wish I could do an image with such a sense of mood. (envious)

Unfortunately the bats are entirely postwork, and I suck at hand-drawing things completely from scratch. I did try to have one resting on the wall, but I couldn't get it the way I wanted it and so I scrapped it. In other words, it was both SNAFU and FUBAR lol EDIT: BTW I've submitted a tutorial that describes in depth my method of fire-creating. Assuming of course it gets approved by the mods.

Message edited on: 05/03/2005 19:14

Oh that'll be interesting, thanks. I was going to suggest using a free model of a bat - but the only one I could find when searching for one costs $43. Phew! I'm sure it can't be that hard to make one in say Wings 3D, might be worth asking in the R'osity Wings forum.

Hmm didn't have Wings at the time... good idea though. Now you've got me thinking. Umm... the main trouble would be the face, bats have very complex faces. I'm sure the wings wouldn't be too hard (how hard can it be when your program is called "Wings"--yup bad pun sorry about that). The body also likely wouldn't cause too many problems. Thanks

I'm going to have a go at making a bat in Wings - but for a bat shape in the distance in the sky, you wouldn't need any detail in the face - just the shape.