Most fire materials for Vue and bryce, suck, it's just limitation of the systems it seems,always have problems some how, or ti doens't look good, so it's usually far better to import a good photoshop image with alpha, and use as a billboard.

I may have cracked it, to an extent.

Was messing around today...check this...until Vue has particle system, is about best I can do, lol.

Sphere on left, Two terrains rotated 90 degrees on right (a better shape would help of course, but it was quickly painted terrains, symetrical terrains, aka, a lattice in Bryce, so it's solid for a volumetric to work with)
:)

(course, somone has probably made some mat that's much better, and I'm behind the times, lol)

Ah, HA! more like it :)

That second one look real good! 

Yup...second one is hot....

I've been having a lot of trouble with volumetrics......they disappear when applied to metablobs, they display the underlying geometry when they intersect, they change from one scene to another....very irritating. It's good to see someone show them who is boss lol.....

Monsoon,
arggghh! yes I get same problems, or if you DUPLICATE a sphere with one, both spheres disappear from render! :cursing:

had similar problems with Bryce, years ago. Sigh.
Wish I had shown them who's boss, mate!  :laugh:

Using "volume shaded" works, but often need to tweak the material per object, each object...

best way so far, seems to be applying them to a symetrical terrain.

Volumetrics take forever to render.  Carrara has a good particle generator and can make nice firestorms.

To have realistic volumetric fire is would be so nice.  Silverblade's 2nd pic looks good.  

I can get Volumetrics to work with metablobs only if all the the objects in the group have the same texture.

My issues with metablobs could go on for a number of posts. :(
 

yup...similarity of problems with vue and Bryce metablobs and volumetrics is almost exaclty the same.
Drove me nuts :p

Same with that intersecting problem and underlying geometry - thats in bryce as well :/

I give up on volumetrics.....just can't control them. Been trying to get a grip on  them for weeks now and with very little success. So, I went into the material editor yesterday, bound and determined to not come out again until I had some kind of special effect...with or without volumetrics.

This is what I had by this afternoon.....a quite passable explosion without volumetrics...just lots of fractal transparencies and color distributions.

To illustrate, I torched one of my Rim ships lol.....

Holy smokes!  That looks great!  No volumetrics??? 

That looks fantastic, Monsoon.

Ooooooooooh! nice, Monsoon! :)

Hm, i used a greyscale gradient to drive a distribution of materials over the length of a ship's hull...
applied vertically, so, smoke would thin at a height....? :)

For these I used the 'fuzzy' transparency for the first material and then mixed that with an invisible mat with the distribution driven by a function. You can then use altitude/slope for the added layer of transparency.  I'm going back into Vue today for another round of experimentation and see what else I can come up with.  I've been playing with the metaclouds as well..stretching them way out for contrails etc....it works somewhat but you can't change the color schemes too much.

I would love a tutorial on how to do that great effect Monsoon. Nice!!