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Lets get started, and a note before we start, you don't have to follow this tutorial exactly, be creative; make changes which will suit you best for what your making. First to start off, let me say that this is not using standard 3dsmax combustion, I think its quite ineffective and many plugins emulate the effect better (however most aren't free!). I used the free 'Blurfire' plugin made by Blur Studios which requires the more common package most MAX users know about, blurlib... also made by Blur Studios. *Up-to-date as of Jan 1/ 2004* Blurlib for 3dsmax 3.x - click here
(www.crinan.demon.co.uk) Blurlib for 3dsmax 3.x - click here (www.max3d.com) Other plugins for other versions can easily be searched for at Max3d. As this tutorial grows older these links will probably die, if you can't find these files search for them using a search engine. If you find my links are dead and you found a working link to the plugin please contact me. Once installed (read instructions, put into /3dsmax/plugins etc.) getting a good flame for fire can be made in little time with little effort if used right. Lets get started. First make a Sphere gizmo (Helpers Tab > Spherical icon) anywhere you want your fire to be shown and click hemisphere in its options unless you want a ball of flame. You should use the top viewport for laying it down if you want a vertical flame. Then non uniform scale it how you want to make the flame taller, fatter ect. You should have something as simple as this now:
The next part is where we set up the flame characteristics of what it should look like. This is quite interesting as you can make a flames look plasma-like by changing the colors around or make it look like a very slow reaction of some weird substance by slowing down the flames animation and so forth. Click Rendering Tab (or menu) > Environments Under the atmosphere tab click Add and select Blur fire. This is the plugin you installed earlier (I hope) that will help us. When added click the item from the list (Blur fire) and you will be greeted with a list of options starting off with the colors. The colors are quite understandable, the inner flame color, middle, and outer. You can set this up in any fashion you would want. I played around with the values a bit which resembled real flames, some values you might want to change if you non-uniform scaled your spheregizmo much different than mine. Here is what I used for my flames:
For flames in an earth atmosphere you would want a stretch above two, anything below would make it look like a ball of gas in space. The density should be played around with in your settings as other flames would need to look different. Containment is how much flame will fill the spheregizmo and one last note do not use 10.0 flame detail for close-ups or animating at all. Stick to 3-4 for animating, and 25 samples. Curl also should be 1.5 not 0 so it doesn't make the flames look straight, I messed the picture up, sorry! Flame size can be useful for making the flames look gigantic (using small flame size) or smaller than a match (large flame size). Next just render the picture and take a look! The animation part I wasn't playing around much because everyone knows that effects like this can slow a render magnificently, the render posted at the bottom took 20 minutes on my Athlon 800 using 3dsmax 3 built in scanline renderer. I cant help you out with those figures but I am almost sure that the phase is the flame speed and convection is how fast the flames sway. If you have the time to answer in more depth please contact me. Have fun people! (Here is a picture with inverse colored flames, these can almost act like strange clouds if used properly)
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