Tutorial: Fake Volumetrics
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 RodrÃguez 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.
Video demonstrations can be found here and here. (right click and save as.)
Download the .blend file here.
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.
All I see when I click the link is a white rectangle
OK, now it became a square, not that it matters…………….
broken link…
Right-click the link, choose “Copy Shortcut”, and paste into your browser.
Don’t ask me why it works…
By pasting into your browser, I meant the address bar in your browser.
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.
Really nice tutorial, I didn’t try it ‘yet’, but I certainly will do it this weekend. :)
Congrats for the tutorial my friend!
hope to have time to check it out.
cheers!
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
try doing that with a metaball-balls
it will look better,trust me
My first test: http://www.cginsomniac.com/WIP/fire.jpg
Anyone else have one?
Brian try the same but this time with a metaball instead of a sphere(and adjust the overall size and make rendersize very low)
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.
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.
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.
Hello, this is a old cloud test with the same technique.
http://salvador.mata.com.mx/blends/clouds.avi
http://salvador.mata.com.mx/blends/volumfake.jpg
http://salvador.mata.com.mx/blends/fakevol.mov
Nice tute, but yes as Eugene says follow the pics not the text, as they don’t match up!
Great Tut!!!
…and like Salvador Mata RodrÃguez 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
Nice boom Blendercross. Would you be willing to share the .blend with us?
Sure!!
Okay – I am bad in Internet things! How can id this?
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
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
A cloud test with a variant of the shader presented here: http://www.cginsomniac.com/WIP/800x600cloudswithshadows.avi
Hey Brian, that test looks so cool ;)
By the way, I’ve just made some corrections to the tut :D
Glad you like it. More corrections 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 :)