lighting and fire

I wanted to try an emulate the gas lighting of Victorian times, slightly dimmer and warm tones lighting. This would also make the fire look more cosy in comparison since although the tone is the same its a bright focal point which your naturally drawn towards.

fire effects

there were two methods available to make a fire effect which are the sub uv or just using one repeating image. I decided to try both so there was more variation in the scene , I also thought it would make it easier to reuse the particles for other things such as smoke and embers to make the fire more realistic.

Simple fire particle effect 

To make the basic texture for this I used a wet oils blender to smudge blotches of white to get a more natural billowing shape to the flame, this was then imported into unreal and made into a material which I could then use for a cascading particle system. I ended up reusing this one for different effects in the scene such as dust, smoke and embers. This meathod,even thought it worked well for the other effects didn't produce a very good fire effect since it didn't flicker in the same way as a normal fire so I think it should only be used for smaller details that are not focus point.

Sub UV 

This was my favourite method because it was just as easy as the first but produced a much better result. There were different ways i could have gone about making the flipbook for this effect such as using Houdini to curate a fire effect you liked and then exporting a flipbooks from that which i did experiment with using Houdini apprentice but my pc had issues so i couldn't fine tune it much past the standard fire effects but here is what i made in Houdini.

The easier method that i went back to using was to get a video of a fire on a neutral background and taking the frames to use as alpha frames .i found two ways to automate this process to make it quicker, the first was to load in the video directly to photoshop using the “video frames to layers” automation, after this reduced the number of frames too 16 and then exported the frames as jpegs so i could use the “contact sheet ii” function to properly lay them out quickly and more accurately than I could probably do. Then I adjusted the batch to be grayscale and adjusted levels to get the contrast I wanted.

From here I again went into unreal and used the flipbook to make a material with the node set up shown here:

Then plugged it into a particle system to get this result after adjusting the settings to be correct, this i think its a fairly realistic fire effect and I ended up using this for the main fire since it worked so well, with the addition of the extra details such as sparks and smoke it really tied the scene together nicely.