I ended up needing to do postwork to clean up the torch because I wasn't able to get a clean effect out of Vue. What I did is use four spheres. The first is at the base of the flame with a glowing red material. Two have Vue fire mats on them slightly stacked, and the last is just above those and has a smoke material. I put a point light in the middle of the lower flame sphere, and it is the only light for the pic (I deleted the sun). The first problem was that two fire spheres ended up with a distinct "halo" around them (because the point light is inside them?). The more I messed with the material settings, the worse it got, so in the end I had to blend it out. The second was that my smoke ended up very flatlooking..not many eddys or variations. Again the more I messed with it the worse it got, so I finally just painted over that area to improve its appearance. I'd greatly appreciate any comments on how I approached this...maybe spheres aren't the best way to do this kind of thing? Other than that, I cheated the background blur with postwork because I haven't figured out how to use the depth of field thing yet. ;)

Nothing wrong with postwork... better not be I'd be totally screwed if it was ~G~ Very nice image.

Oh I don't know, I think it looks great...Sharen

Nice fire and smoke ! I don't think it's possible to improve this part of the image... Yves

As for myself... I love it a lot!

As for post work, I don't do it for the challenges because I want to show what Vue can do. But for anything else I will do it extensively if that is what it takes to get the scene the way I want. So no problem with that at all. :)

The pic is very cool. :)

Thanks! Please don't get me wrong...I wasn't trying to say that postwork is bad. I'm a firm believer in using whatever tools you have (postwork or otherwise) to express your vision the way you want it expressed. I'm very happy with this image, its just that I tried very hard to get the fire out of Vue and wasn't able to...its very frustrating, you know what I mean? I know it can be done because look at all the people that just did it! I think I must have done something wrong with the spheres for their outlines to be visible in the render, or I shouldn't be using spheres in the first place... scifiguy's head takes a couple of Exorcists spins AAAARRRRRGH! :)

:) Well if you look at my 2nd entry, the fire breather you can see the sphere outlines slightly. On a darker scene I could hide it within Vue, but I couldn't in that one because of the lighting. VERY frustrating as I never was able to remove it from within Vue without removing some light. Easy to remove in postwork though. :)

lovely image there, I think you did everything just right in the end!

That is an awesome image, the fire looks really great! It is for precisely this reason that I love postwork so much :)

heyas; if you don't want rounded edges.... you can overlap several spheres to make a conglomerated puffy edge. if you have vue 4, you can try using a rock instead of a sphere. the 'fuzzy' setting will make the edges less hard, as well; did you try that? some other stuff might affect the edge hardness.... like the shallow water/deep water colour settings, and how murky you set the murkiness.... oh, and if you used colour transmitted light, you get an outline edge on your primitive. to make the flames more wavery, if you can't find a more wavery function you like.... try using the distortions... for a flame material, you probably want to use the ones on the last tab; the effects tab. turn on the fractal and turbulence stuff, and play with those settings. that will shake things up :)

Thanks again everyone! Great tips bloodsong. Using a rock never occurred to me...that's a really good idea. I've still got a lot to learn...the materials settings almost have more options than I know what to do with! LOL