Tutorial: Fake Volumetrics

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fire ball.Some of you might remember Colin Litser’s cloud creation tutorial. Which took a look at creating volumetric cloud effects in Blender. But how about taking it a step further. Who hasn’t wanted to blow up a building in a fiery explosion? (in 3D of course!) Or how about launching a comet into orbit?

Salvador Mata Rodríguez has provided us with an excellent tutorial on how to begin to do just that. The tutorial takes a look at creating volumetric smoke and fire effects in Blender using a mixture of procedurals. The smoke would make an excellent start in cloud creation.

Find the tutorial here.

Video demonstrations can be found here and here. (right click and save as.)
Download the .blend file here.

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    • http://www.geneome.net Eugene (etr9j)

      There is one step that some folks might get caught up on. He state: “The next procedural wil be a Blend again, but this time set to Sphere mode, with their map inputs in Win, Sphere and Z, mapped to a Alpha channel with Substract blending mode.” But the image shows Nor, Flat not Win, Sphere. My suggestion is to follow the images over the text if they contradict.

    • http://gat.animepaper.net/ Gat

      All I see when I click the link is a white rectangle

    • http://gat.animepaper.net/ Gat

      OK, now it became a square, not that it matters…………….

    • quailman

      broken link…

    • NateB2

      Right-click the link, choose “Copy Shortcut”, and paste into your browser.

      Don’t ask me why it works…

    • NateB2

      By pasting into your browser, I meant the address bar in your browser.

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      The lightbox plugin (the one that’s doing the fancy image display) is causing some problems these days; I’m not sure why. I’ve disabled it for this post and the link is fine now. I’ll look into it later this weekend.

    • http://www.nathan.nl.tt JD-Multi

      Really nice tutorial, I didn’t try it ‘yet’, but I certainly will do it this weekend. :)

    • http://www.venomgfx.com.ar venomgfx

      Congrats for the tutorial my friend!

      hope to have time to check it out.

      cheers!

    • http://salvador.mata.com.mx Mata

      Thanks :D I hope you like it and found it usable :)

      Also sorry for any mistakes :S, english is not my native. I’ll do all the corrections to the tutorial ;) and publish the fireball blend file.

      :D

    • bluelife

      try doing that with a metaball-balls
      it will look better,trust me

    • http://www.cginsomniac.com Brian

      My first test: http://www.cginsomniac.com/WIP/fire.jpg

      Anyone else have one?

    • bluelife

      Brian try the same but this time with a metaball instead of a sphere(and adjust the overall size and make rendersize very low)

    • http://www.cginsomniac.com Brian

      First, I think I’m going to tweak the alpha prior to trying that. I’m pretty sure there might be some issues with materials since it will map to the whole metaball group. Unless that has changed since last I tested metaballs.

    • http://www.osysi.net Bmud

      I like engineering effects like this… I think if you use a Fresnel transparency ramp (or any other transparency ramp for that matter) it’ll remove some of the artifacts.

    • http://www.cginsomniac.com Brian

      Yeah. One noticeable negative about this effect is the thickness throughout the whole volume. Something easily fixed with some alpha/transparecy. I look forward to tweaking this more when I get home.

      I’d also like to direct those looking further at creating fire effects to this oldie: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=35218&highlight=fire+particles

      Definetly still a goodie.

    • http://salvador.mata.com.mx/blog Mata
    • Steve

      Nice tute, but yes as Eugene says follow the pics not the text, as they don’t match up!

    • blendercross

      Great Tut!!!
      …and like Salvador Mata Rodríguez says at the end of that tut:

      Ready! We don’t have fire/smoke plug in for blender, but blender itself can be capable of do almost anything you can imagine! Blender is great!

      He´s right – but somtimes it is good if someone explain which way you can go,
      becaus there are so many ways…

      This is an example of my try to create an boom:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TzF4gq5gJQ

    • http://www.cginsomniac.com Brian

      Nice boom Blendercross. Would you be willing to share the .blend with us?

    • blendercross

      Sure!!

      Okay – I am bad in Internet things! How can id this?

    • blendercross

      Okay forgot my last post!
      I hope it work – if not give my a call!
      ( was the fastet way to share that file )

      http://www.hostarea.de/server-12/Dezember-efeb87ba99.zip

    • http://salvador.mata.com.mx/blog Mata

      I’ve just made some corrections in the fireball post ( thanks for the advice) and added some docs and other blends (fireball anim and cloud test)

      http://salvador.mata.com.mx/blog/wp-images/fireball_tut/Blender_FV.rar

    • http://www.cginsomniac.com Brian

      A cloud test with a variant of the shader presented here: http://www.cginsomniac.com/WIP/800x600cloudswithshadows.avi

    • http://salvador.mata.com.mx/blog Mata

      Hey Brian, that test looks so cool ;)

      By the way, I’ve just made some corrections to the tut :D

    • http://www.cginsomniac.com brian

      Glad you like it. More corrections Mata?

    • http://salvador.mata.com.mx/blog Mata

      ;)

      well, Only corrections for some typos, I didn’t notice that from Eugene:

      “…There is one step that some folks might get caught up on. He state: “The next procedural wil be a Blend again, but this time set to Sphere mode, with their map inputs in Win, Sphere and Z, mapped to a Alpha channel with Substract blending mode.” But the image shows Nor, Flat not Win, Sphere. My suggestion is to follow the images… ”

      And added some extra files I mentioned before :)