The Nevers Fire VFX Recreation: Trial and Error
The end of the semester is a little too close for comfort, yet still I trudge on with my pyro sim trials! It has been a rough journey so far to say the least, full of countless different discarded setups for getting my fire to look just right, but that seems to be how working with volumes works in general. This week’s work was no different of course, to my dismay it looked like I had to once again try out a new setup for my initial burst fire explosion.
My latest attempt was the closest I had gotten yet, a setup that consisted of four small spheres instead of one big one, each with its own diagonal velocity to get that butterfly type shape I’ve been aiming for. With some help and further ideation from Nelson, I was able to improve on this setup to have more control over the custom velocity being emitted from each small sphere that makes up the full burst.
This setup starts with assigning the sphere’s velocity to its normals, making it radiate outwards in all directions. The sphere is then clipped to only the section of it that I need to be emitting velocity, and a handful of attribute noises and other nodes are added to adjust the shape of that sphere’s velocity field. Rinse and repeat three more times, and you’ve got my setup for getting the velocity of the initial burst.
After that, I just transferred that new velocity data onto one larger sphere, and was able to follow the pretty standard procedure of simulating the fire and exporting it through a pyro bake node. Of course it wasn’t as simple as just recounting the nodes is, I spent a good chunk of time just making micro adjustments to the pyro solver node to get the fire behavior to break up the shapes from the velocity fields in just the right way. But, such is life when trying to art direct a pyro sim, so I’ve learned.
Other than my main toils with the initial burst, the rest of the aspects of my shot recreation from the Nevers hasn’t been looking so bad. Last week I was able to get a pretty solid setup working to refine my flame shell, diving into the pyro solver actual node setup and DOP network to add a field force that helped the flames conform more to the sphere geometry it’s sourced from. I won’t go into a full explanation here since I cannot take credit for the idea, I learned it from a very helpful tutorial by Stefan Sietzen, who broke down the process a lot better than I could.
The sparks I created also haven’t been too hard to work with, probably because at this point going back to particle sims and pop nets is like a warm welcome home from the toils of pyro sims. I was even able to utilize the velocity field I created for my initial burst to drive the sparks’ velocity, so it wasn’t too hard to get them to integrate with the motion of the initial burst. Past that, it was just a matter of adjusting forces in the pop sim to get the right balance of velocity and drag to keep the energy up but also allow the sparks to have that float-y moment of being caught by some wind right as they begin to disperse.
Armed with all these new elements to integrate together, I was able to produce this work in progress shot for the week:
I would be lying if I said I was totally confident in being able to fully refine and finish this by the end of the semester, but if I can continue improving at this rate, I think I should just barely be able to make it.
