Does anyone have any recommendations for creating neat fire effects without using mass amounts of particle geometry? I need to do a couple things...explosions, fire, large fires. I'm willing to set things on fire if I need to, but I need to know what the best ways of capturing the fire would be. Will rate for suggestions (even bad ones ;))

How about a simple animation, I did it and it looks quite good with several bill boarded copies on top of each other, and add a few dots for debris.

I've uploaded it to my site for you,
explosion.rar
It's (64x64) 61 frames + 61 Alpha frames.

I found the effect in an online 3DStudio Max archive, all I had to do was load it and render it out.

Just thought of another, how about a Quake2 style mushroom mesh?

I’m sure this could be made to look real cool, with today’s pixel shaders and other new stuff I know little about.

Well the problem is that they need to be photorealistic or at least believeable with suspended disbelief. A Q2 style explosion like that would definitely conflict with the rest of the world. ;)

I was thinking more on par with HL2 actually.

Edit:
Btw your first explosion is pretty good, but I think it would still conflict with the style. Your suggestions are very much appreciated though.

Has anyone tried capturing fire on video yet? I'm afraid of doing this because I know I'll end up over-exposing the shots...then I would have to figure out how to make the animation seemless.

like this? no idea.

Half Life 2:



Its kind of a bad example, but thats so far the best looking style of fire I've seen in a game.

One more:

My opinion? You're screwed.

Basically what you want to do is make fire that is created by mass particles without the mass particles part. The problem is that the mass particles is sort of how it works in the first place. Layer enough flat, silly looking textures together and it starts to look decent after a while. If you don't want to layer enough silly textures, it ends up... still looking silly.

The fire in that HL2 picture is just the same texture, like the .rar bobason456 posted, repeated a whole bunch of times with varied rotation and scale. Looking at UE3 videos, they're still doing the same thing for their explosions. In fact they even use a texture very much like the .rar in this thread.

If you want a better looking flame than that .rar, well... I'm no photographer but I would try 1)hanging something small and flammable in front of a black backdrop, 2)lighting it and filming the flame from the side, 3)cutting the video down to a sequence of frames that loops well, and 4)editing the alpha of each frame by hand to get rid of the blackness (a script, like a photoshop action, could help with this).

You can get away with just a few particles at a time but it will look worse the closer you get to it.

I don't mind using a bunch of particles. I just don't want to fill up the screen with 1000000000 polys of just fire.

Here is a picture of a flaming rock I made. It could also be a flaming marshmellow! Whatever floats your boat.



(if the pic doesn't show up click here)

[Edited by - DigiDude on September 18, 2005 7:25:14 PM]