process: create 3d Fire effects

Rob Redman shows how to make a plume of 3D fire ready for compositing

one pre-requisites

Fusion can’t do anything with particles without two nodes, so add both a pemitter and a prender node. They can be found by the usual methods but as they’re common tools they also have shortcut buttons on the menu bar, where they are labelled pem and prn. Once done, drag the prender node into the right hand viewer window.

three initial styling

Select the emitter and head to the Style tab. Here you can unfold the colour over life controls, and add a few knots of your chosen colour. I’ve gone for very obvious yellow/ red/grey, but you can do anything you like for fire or electric energy particle beams, and so forth. I reduced the alpha of the yellow knot to add some brightness.

Five animation detail

Fire moves in a very organic way and a great method of animating this is to add a pturbulence node but rather than let it be constant, open the Strength over Life controls and click on the spline to add points, moving them and their handles to make a random strength profile, which will imitate gusts and eddies.

two depth of emission

In the region section of the emitter, choose Bitmap as the Region type. An input will be added to the node, where you can hook up an image to drive the particles’ spawn position. I added a Fast Noise node with a spherical mask, to soften the edges. The greyscale nature of Fast Noise makes it easy to work with.

Four add Flame detail

For more realism and detail we can use another masked Fast Noise node, so add them to your workspace and in the emitter style change it to Bitmap and plug in the Fast Noise to the newly created input on the emitter – adjusting noise settings to taste. I also grouped and renamed the paired Fast Noises with their masks to help keep things tidy.

six prep to render

Of course you’ll want to render this out to see the finished result. To do so, I ungrouped my nodes then linked them up to a Merge3d, which was also connected to a Camera3d and then on to a Renderer3d, which output to a Saver node. I set the render and saver as 16:9 and render out as a simple quicktime.