How hard is fire?

L

LloydC

Veteran
I'm a complete beginner with AE. I'm curious how hard it is to make realistic fire on a person's body. It sounds incredibly hard and I'm guessing it requires immense amount of skill.

Just hoping there is some easy plug-in...

Thanks for any help.
 
Rent Fantastic Four, the BTS goes into how they created the Human Torch. Not really a full on tutorial, but nice to know stuff... ya know?
 
hmmm... that´s major league stuff.
Not easy if you want to make it beliveable.

I would have 2 aproaches.

1. Real fire on a stuntman in a green suit in front of a geenscreen that tries to repeat the same movement as your "torch" talent.

You will probably go nuts while keying and trying to matche the movement.

2. Particle system (may look cheesy)
Attach (motion track) several particle systems to your talent.

Try "Partuicular" (Red giant) or "Partical Illusion " the later would be my favourite for that task.

Adding a CC layer for the reflection/lighting of the flames on the talent and one that creats the wobblyng air/heat my camouflage cheesy particles.

Frank
 
Fire and blood still look obviously digital on even the biggest budget movies.
 
Your best bet, is to get footage of fire in real life with mostly black background, (buy stock or shoot your own).

Then try to composite many instances around what you want to be on fire, then roto scope it if their moving.
That's just the base, you will to do a lot more than that to make it look good and real.
 
Ditto on all the sentiments to mix real fire and digital fire. The most convincing digital effects are always coupled with practical effects in some sense.

In the case of setting someone on fire, this is not an easy thing to accomplish on a zero or micro-budget film. So far as I'm concerned, there's no way of getting a good practical effect without hiring a stuntman and pyrotechnician who really know what they're doing. Even then, I'd be nervous.

That being said, I've been fooling around with a 3DSMax plugin called FumeFX. It's pretty remarkable. Depending on the scale of the effect, it might be all you need provided that you're willing to try and do some match-moving and modelling.

Ultimately, I think the answer to this question depends on what you're trying to pull off. If you want to set someone on fire Jason-Vorhees style, I think you're going to find any digital solutions unsatisfying.
 
Thank you so much! This advice is exactly what I was looking for.

I'm going to try shooting some live fire (I like that pipe idea) and composite it in. That seems to be the most feasible way for realistic fire.

I might just get an experienced VFX artist to do it though as we do have some money for the effects.

Anyone interested? :)
 
Get a VFX artist. A maya generalist might be able to. But the best bet is to go with a dedicated fluid and dynamics guy.

I work with fluids and dynamics almost exclusively. And fire is one of the hardest things to recreate in a digital realm next to water. (Which is god awful)

You need to use Maya at the least to get a realistic flame. Hire it out, or composite it in. AE won't be able to make you a realistic person on fire.
 
Like I said, watch the BTS on Fantastic Four, it will only cost you $3 to rent it. If you lived closer, I'd say come over, have a couple beers and watch it :)
 
Water is actually quite easy with real flow, and renderman studio, maya fluids is still your best bet for fire, well maya and houdini, the fire and explosions in the truck vs. jet in die hard 4 was mainly houdini, looked pretty good, but your best bet for movie fire short of setting your objects/actors on fire and filming it, is to mix methods, use maya fluids, mixed with black box fire for one shot, then houdini for another, then black box, then mix it up more. make it messy make it fast, and make the shots quick, cut away for reactions, with lights flickering on your actors.

the dvd extras are nice, but I would suggest trying to get your hands on the demo reels of the fluids artists, watch their shot break downs, I would suggest either shooting your actor on a green screen, add some random blacks into its alpha, taking this alpha with random blacks as a "rgb" into maya as a texture, then have the blacks control your Particle emmitter, have your particles die a frame or two after creation and in that fram or two, have them emmit your fluids,

what they did in FF, was model the actors hands and or arms when needed, and track his real movement, and then set the model on fire. this method is much more realistic looking as the fire actaully wraps around the hands and arms, but also much more complex, and as film is actually a 2d medium, if its a quick shot, the time and money this method would take, really wouldn't be worth it.

btw, AE's particles for home movies looks cute. I didn't know it was even an option, but I stopped using AE years ago,

Thank you
Jason Miller
 
Real Flow is great. But it is a Hefty investment, 2700 for the software. Conveniently enough, I own it. But before real flow, real looking water was very difficult.
 
I enlisted a friend who is a pyro maniac and loves burning **** up, so I'll be shooting some live fire elements then compositing it in.

Any tips on making burnable objects that are to scale so it's easier to composite in (and more realistic looking)?
 
you dont really want to scale up fire, you can scale it down, it will look pretty cool faster, more flicker, but when you scale it up it looks bad fast. however fire layers well, so build a life size shoulder, back, neck, and so on, get close, make it as large in the camera without clipping the flame, then scale it down and move it around in shake,

good luck.

Jason Miller
 
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