So on the previous story I'm still trying to figure out where this guy spent the $300 dollars. Not that it wasn't a really tastefully done piece, but I don't see anything that costs money in that piece, assuming you have a camera and a computer you too can create specialFX shorts like this. To illustrate this we here at the NeoArchaicRevue are going to continue some of our FX threads in the past, illustrating how to film and use special FX shots along with compositing them with 3D to pull off what use to be only accessible to large budget studios.

To start with let's take a look at fire. Why? It's FIRE! That's why......

Generally fire is done in 3D by a particle generation system, often even multiple particle generators along with smoke particle generators as well. Because whle we see a continuous cloud of smoke in reality it is bazillions of little carbon and other molecules kicked into the air by the action of burning. Now to calculate the position of every molecule of carbon released as something burns would be ridiculous even for something as small as a single tea candle. To ease the calculations necessary for the computer things are downscaled quite a bit to where we are only dealing with tens of thousands of particles and not billions. Anyhow, just be thankful the computer gets stuck with the math. There are also other techniques to create fire and smoke, and people have come up with some interesting alternatives. Let's actually take a look at some different examples. Start off by downloading blender.

Then head to this page:

http://www.centralsource.com/blender/flames/

There you can find a number of .blend files that contain some sort of setup with something burning in it. At this point your welcome to toy around with the various .blend files. Specifically use the render menu to render the animations yourself, reposition the camera. Now YOU are the director! Now just to learn what all these buttons do, no? Well, that's beyond the scope of this little article. But I encourage you to try out some of the tutorials on the tutorial page:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials

and don't forget to print out the blender quickstart page (it's designed for an A4 sized page):

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Reference/QuickStart

It's a great reference page to have lying around while trying to get your bearings in blender.

Okay so for now you've got blender running and can open these fire files, and at the very least export the animation to a movie file. Next time we'll discuss particle generation some more and point to more uses for it aside from fire and smoke. And we'll detail some of the other techniques used in the above fire examples that don't include particle generators.