Fire!

To create the fire I would be using a particle system, in this case called Blizzard. The first step obviously was to rotate the emitter round so that rather than falling particles they were rising. I originally followed a tutorial to create my fire effect, which was very useful. However as with most cases I have found if I tweak little things from their tutorial I will end up creating something much more realistic in my opinion. This was the case yet again. The most important aspect for the fire was the material applied to it. The tutorial helped me get the basis of this but produced far too smokey a fire. Here is a screenshot of the material preview:






















After much thought I set about reworking the material following the general structure of using smoke maps for multi layers and which map slots to include. The major change I decided upon however was to change from a Blinn shader to a Translucent Shader, this was my key to avoiding the smoke. Opacity and translucency were the key to this material as it needed be bright at the base of the flame but then the colour would need to fade away and become slightly smoke-ish. My material ended up being a lot brighter than the one from the tutorial and all the better for it, here is the preview of the material:






















The emitter for the fire required a shape for the flames, since I did not believe that ticks or dots were good enough for this I set about creating my own geometry. This was created from a sphere that I added a noise modifier to setting its scale to 4.777, checking the fractal box and adjusting the iterations. Once I applied this to emitter and made a render of the fire I could see that the flames were looking good. Here is a screenshot of the tutorial’s fire compared to my adjusted fire.





A note to a problem in which occurred whilst i was working on the fire. It turned blue! Yes, for some reason when I added some lighting into my scene the flames turned blue. I managed to solve this problem by adjusting the properties for the emitter to not receive shadows. This solved my problem instantly and my fire was now red hot again.



















For now I decided the fire was done, until I decided to create the housing for it and any other bits that might accompany it. I moved on to creating the ‘right hand side’ of the pump.