I’ve started a new project involving Maya and Zbrush and a big part of it is going to use simulation data from Maya. There are three parts, smoke, water, and fire. I haven’t created a fluid effects fire in a while so I thought I would spend the morning working out some flames to get back into the swing of things. This fire was made from a 3D fluid container using a volume based emitter in Maya 2013. After I had parameters I was happy with I baked out the simulation into a cache file. This makes the rendering way faster as you’re not trying to simulate and render each frame at the same time. It also lets you store that data and scrub through your simulation.
I’m working of a Mac Mini right now which is a little weak in the processing department, but hey at least I have something to work with. Come Christmas I will be visiting Winnipeg so that I can get my computer along with the rest of my apartment and move it here to Montreal.
The end result for the project will be a lot more stylized, especially when it comes to colour. I find its always best to match the physical phenomenon as best you can before you start to push the style. The YouTube compression beats up the softness and sharp contrast of the flames, but it’s just a test so I didn’t want to have to sit and wait for a 180 frames and 1080p. This will do as a start for the next step of the project which will be shaping and re shading the fire. As always if you have any questions don’t be afraid to ask. I don’t bite, I promise :)
UPDATE
I squeezed in some more time this evening to iterate further on the flames, playing with the colour settings and getting them to spin the way I wanted using Maya’s force fields in the fluid container. This particular test makes the flames too skinny and high, but I feel I’ve nailed the mechanic down to make them spin.
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