CompuServe Thread

Hello Dominic, I'm no expert but you might want to try this: Create two large spheres with the tops cut off. ( around the object that will be burning ) Create One large tube with the top flared out on top.^ (center on spheres) The spheres will be our fire and the tube will be our smoke. (^) After your basic scene is laid out, its time to create maps, we need two different opacity maps, one for the fire and one for the smoke. You may wish to create this in a paint program such as Animator Pro or something like TIPS. The opacity map for smoke will be the same as fire with a few extra plumes added. To create the fire material, assign the opacity map, ( The one you just created in Animator Pro and named Fire.* ) Give it a color of red. There aren't any shaded areas in Fire, So make all the colors red."specular, ambient, diffuse". Set to Self-Illum-Two-sided. For the Smoke make it different shades of Gray, it too is transparent so click on "Two-sided"-Shininess to 20 & Self-Ilum. Assign the smoke picture as an opacity map. You'll have to deal with the object thats burning in what ever way seems appropriate. Once all the materials are put in the current library & that library is saved, we can go back to the 3D Editor- Assign mapping coord's. Create a Camera and Lights. Place one red omni light High above the scene, Place another under the "fire" (object that's burning) But adjust the Lumence Down -(46) should do it. Add a Greenish-Yellow Light Up and Off to the Side, and one Bright Green spotlight down inside the "fire" (Object that's Burning) Point it Up or Out depending on your burning object. Set some background picture and render. Render-Animate-Enjoy! Works for me! James M. Murphy James Murphy Consulting Green Bay Wisconsin U.S.A. Now signing up 3DS Students <g>

Dominic, I'll tell you what works for me. I have found that you can make several types of fire. Really depends on whether you want a "clean" burn like that in a fireplace or a "dirty" burn like a building or car or anything that is combustible. On a clean burn, I used multiple diameter tubes that were tapered at the top. If you assign at least 8 or 9 of them all on top of each other, you can rapidly scale them to different scales and at different rates to create a randomness to the burn. You must create the scales quite large and quite rapid to give the rapid flicker. For color I was never satisfied with a single color from the MatEd. The 'SMOKE' SXP mixed with Transparency 20 and Falloff (Outside/80) works great. If you migrate your colors between bright orange and yellow, the swirl and mixture is there. For a 'dirty' burn, I used 10-12 spheres in a line with rapidly changing scales. They all overlapped each other. The more spheres you use the more real the dirty smoke. (…also the longer rendering time because of the calcs for the 'SMOKE' SXP. Make sure you taper the scales from the sphere closest to the fire at the smallest scale to the largest the farther away from the fire. In a 'dirty' fire, you can migrate the colors from black to dark brown and the spheres closest to the fire you can migrate between orange and black to mix the fire into the smoke. I've been happy with it. Good Luck Chris