Fireball effect with Blender smoke simulation - with settings picture tutorial

If you like to know about some settings, check here: http://www7.pic-upload.de/26.01.12/eicumiikkt.jpg

Picture Mirror:
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=25190
(should be online until the end of May 2012)

If the first link is not working anymore, please contact me. But the pic-hoster page says, they store it forever, as long as you stay under 16MB. :)

HOW TO CREATE such an freeze-orbit-effect:

I wish I had done the freeze-rotation with 1 more key step between each of them, to make it smoother. Perhaps you've also seen another of my effects, which rotate nicer. :D

To get this effect done in a video is a bit of a workaround. First of all, I haven't used the bake-button so far for any of my smoke renders. Perhaps it will be nessessary in the future, if scenes become more complex.

Blender builds the smoke data frame by frame when you just start rendering the animation, before the emitter starts. So everytime I created such an effect, I rendered the entire smoke sim first, and put the effect in later.

When you do that... rendering without baking, blender will probably delete the smoke data the moment you stop the render or when its last frame has been rendered. So if you decide to interrupt and you want to continue rendering later or the next day... go into the temp folder for this blendfile and set write protect to all, or just the last 3 files (to be sure). Before you stop the render!

So, Blender creates smoke data frame by frame. I guess everything else would just be pointless calculation time. Imagine you jump 100 frames and would have to wait until the smoke data has been calculated. Well, if you have decided which frame's the one for the bullettime effect, you need to move the following temp files to another folder, in case you want to use them later.

Lets say you want to use frame 200 for the effect. Then place the first camera key at 201 and the others where you decide to want them. When the camera flight is set up, you may have to check the temp folder again, and perhaps delete fresh created temp data of frame 201 and 202. Now everything should be in place to start rendering (images) from 202.

If you have setup your cam and everything else, but the smoke for frame 200 suddenly is gone, but still in the temp folder where it's suppose to be, just save, open the .blend again and jump to frame 200. Then hit render animation with 202 as start frame and the magic should start. :D

And I render always images, JPGs, even for animations without simulations. Then I put them together simply and fast with "Virtual Dub". In case you have renderd the entire smoke sim first, and then want to put the effect in, make sure you don't overwrite the already rendered frames.

After you have all frames... you just need to manage to rename them to put them in the proper order. I've created myself a excel tab a long time ago, the results I get from it, I put into a batch file and run it in the folder of the images. But there's always the possibility of manual renaming :D If you want the animation to wait 1sec, just copy frame 200 as often as you need it.

Somewhere you can download tiny renaming tools, I'm sure.

It sounds all very complicated when you do this the first time.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• huge
• fireball
• feuerball
• burn
• burning
• rauch
• smoke
• flame
• flammen
• fire
• feuer
• bullettime
• matrix effect
• matrix effekt
• particles
• partikel
• voxels
• voxel data
• explosion
• effects
• effekt
• effekte
• shader
• texture
• settings
• 2.5
• 2.6

[OptiGE]

Project file?

[Zeitfreund]

@OptiGE Hello! Sorry for late response, technical problems. Yeah well hm... the original file is gone for sure, because I oversaved it back in the days with every new stuff I tryed. BUT, perhaps you have seen my not so old fireball effect compilation... it's almost the same. If you like I can search for a nice clean file and send you the link. :)

[ParanormalEnities]

Whats your specs, how long did it take to culculate? I 've used fumefx and a simulation with this level of detail need at least 4-6 giga ram an a lot of hours of simulating

[Zeitfreund]

@ParanormalEnities In the beginning of 2011 I was forced to upgrade my good seven year old single-core hardware. So it's 6 cores and 8 gig ram now. :-o

A lot month passed and I can't remember exactly... but I think it was under 1 gig ram usage, and yeah, hours of calculating. 90 percent baking, 10 percent render each frame, sort of. And up to 500mb temp data each frame. But only 15.000 particles used for the initial blast.

[crackedman123]

How did you make it look so "smokey"? I cant get that same effect :/

[Zeitfreund]

@crackedman123 Hm, I suppose you have seen the settings. If you mean the thin smoke around the fire. It should show up because of the transparent part of the color ramp in the texture, and when your domain material still has a reflection color with a value. I used 1.0 and white as you can see. Or did you mean the entire effect itself?

Still no luck? No problem, send me a message and we'll figure this out together. :)

[OptiGE]

@Zeitfreund Yes that would be nice

[ParanormalEnities]

@Zeitfreund Well thats amazing then, 1 gig of ram is very low for the quality it has.

I'm impressed with blender it constantly gets better and better while the pricy 3d softwares hardly make any improvment at each version.The only programm that does actually makes significant improvements is Zbrush.

[crackedman123]

@Zeitfreund Awesome, I was trying to add a grey part to the colour ramp section and then after it a plain alpha section. I did that and it had too much smoke. I had actually already tried your method first but all the colour was replaced. I tried again and i got a much similar effect to yours. Thanks heaps Zeitfeund! I Must have just messed up somewhere along the line...