Play Blast and Render of Candle Flame.

Renders of the candle flame when i had finished setting it up.

Sadly after i output the playblast of the flame being influenced by a motion field maya died on me so i never got to finish rendering it. However , judging by the immense render time of the first clip, somewhere between one and two hours, i can safely assume maya will struggle with rendering fire for game engines.

Candle Flame, Dynamics.

Im working through a tutorial to create candle flames in Maya using the dynamics system.

So far I've learned how to create a fluid container and manipulate the fluid so it acts , kind of , like a candle flame. At the moment it looks more like smoke, but i will be changing it so soon it looks more flame like.

Dr. Michael J. Gourlay and Fluid Simulation for video games.

"Video games appeal to our desire to explore and interact with our environment, and adding real-world phenomena-such as fluid motion-allows game developers to create immersive and fun virtual worlds. Recently, physical simulations have become more realistic, but the simulations have largely been limited to rigid bodies. Pervasive simulations of continuous media like cloth and fluids remain uncommon, largely because fluid dynamics entail conceptual and computational challenges that make simulating fluids difficult. "  (Gourlay M, Fluid Simulation for Video Games (part 1), 2012)


These articles by Michael Gourlay show some of the incredibly complex systems behind simulating fluids for video games, though his system also explains how it can be used for fire in parts 9 - 13. 

Although using the mathematics and algorithms presented here is probably way above anything i could achieve this year, it can be used as reference to try to base my simulations in reality. 

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/fluid-simulation-for-video-games-part-9/

Simple Fire Tests using Dynamics.

Using the Dynamics menu and the create fire option I've done a few simple tutorials on the creation of fire in maya. Neither of these are very visually impressive and ill be looking into using the fluid system more in the future, but it was a good place to start.

By selecting the logs and using the create fire menu, when i run the simulation a flood of  green particles appear on the view port.

When i rendered it out the fire was unnaturally large for the campfire size, so using the attribute editor i changed the lifespan, starting size of the particles, fire scale, and intensity to try to make it more realistic.

This was the end result, a smaller, more manageable camp fire. This system however seems very simplistic and i think i can achieve much better results using the nDynamics fluid effects.

A problem with the simulation in maya is if you scrub through the timeline things can get a bit insane. The simulations run from one frame to the next and going backwards and forwards gets some strange results.

 The next part of the tutorial was adding that fire effect to the engine of a pod racer. After selecting one of the fins on the engine block and adding a fire effect from the dynamics menu, i messed around with settings to achieve the look i wanted. 

Initially the fire was far too long and not intense enough

After increasing the intensity and density of the fire, it was looking more striking but was still far too large.

 Then i reduced the lifespan drastically and slightly lowered the glow. Fires that are moving fast like this one would be are generally closer cropped to the source and in the previous renders it was too spread out.

Analysis of fire and how it would spread.

From a digital tutors tutorial "Creating Fire and Smoke using Maya Fluid Effects" there is a flow chart of the way fire will spread inside a house, and the order in which to consider your simulation.

This will help to maintain a sense of realism about any simulations i do, making me think about the source of the fire, the fuel its provided with, and how that can effect other parts of the scene.

Alien : Isolation Fire.

"Alien : Isolation" has some excellent visual effects and is prime example of the increase in graphical fidelity over recent years. Similar to Tomb Raider the fire seems very scripted in its appearances, with certain areas just being on fire in parts of the game, with no natural or dynamic spreading.

The fire is multi layered , and reacts differently depending on where it is in the room. Fire in the walls pours upwards out of holes, while fire close to the ceiling spreads outwards just like it would in real life. The fire also produces heat haze and embers in the air, as well as excellent smoke effects. These both add to the atmosphere and help to cover any parts of the fire that may break immersion, such as repeating flames or parts that don't quite react to the environment properly.

Tomb Raider Fire

The newest instalment of the Tomb Raider franchise  has some quite impressive fire effects in it, though it seems to be very scripted, and only spread along pre determined paths.

The fire looks realistic and in the sequence above is particularly pretty, but throughout the rest of the game a lot of the fire interactions are about burning collectables, which whilst looking good, burn in an unnaturally quick fashion and disintegrate very quickly leaving no trace of the fire.

One thing that adds to the atmosphere, and seems to be present in most games with fire in of recent years, are the embers that floor through the air in areas with a lot of fire. Finding a way to include these in my project will no doubt improve both polish, and realism.

Little Inferno

Little inferno is a game about burning things. Almost the entirety of the game is spent in a first person view staring into a fire place. By burning things you earn coins to buy bigger and more interesting things to burn, with a focus on finding combinations of different items for "achievements" such as
"Spring time" for burning flower seeds and a clock, or "Movie Night" for corn on the cob and a television.

The fire , whilst not strictly realistic is certainly believable. It spreads between objects and after a certain amount of time break apart at stress points showing the physics engine they were built around.

Finals of the Flute Sculpt

 So i have spent a lot longer on this than i originally intended, i felt like i hit a brick wall with the project as a whole and this piece was an idea that was born of desperation rather than inspiration, and such it took me longer to complete.

I felt like i had lost the direction of my project, focusing less and less on the theory behind the work and more on the technical skills, which isn't what this module is meant to be about.

Therefore I'm about to move back into the realm of the more abstract , thinking about how other mediums and practices can impact my workflow, and also about the audience my work is intended for. Ideally I'm heading into creature and character modelling for games, and my work should start to reflect that.

With the sculpt i finished as much detail as i felt was really necessary. Considering that i was doing it as what i would loosely describe as a "master study", trying to take influence from his design choices, from his lighting and composition and try to take elements of this into 3D

The lighting is a fair representation of the lighting in in the painting, but the background is by no way on par with his. I settled fro  a simple gradient where as the original picture is textured with brush strokes and colour in a subtle but interesting way.

I compiled this image the same way as my last sculpt, using a variety of renders from ZBrush with different lights, materials, shadows and rim lights to make a composition of all the light sources.

An example of some of the renders i used to compile the final image.

This is my favourite render, the strong contrast of the light and shadows, as well as the film grain effect give it a striking and i think, frightening appearance. The Iris blur i put around the edge leads the eye towards the hands, the real focus of the original painting.

With these images i overlaid film grain, an effect commonly used in horror games and films to give detail to shadows and darkness, to give things a subtle sense of movement, or to obscure the viewer from seeing things too sharply. Sometimes the enemy of fear is clarity, shrouding details can make the image more compelling.

The same image as above without the film grain.

After assembling all the layers and producing a composite image its easy to play with colour and saturation of the image. I quite liked the washed out pale version, it gave a far different feel to the piece however, making it colder and more corpse like, and made it seem less like a living thing, more like a statue or corpse.

Increasing the Saturation to a more orange look in some ways brought it closer to the painting, but made the highlights far too vibrant.

The plain sculpt

Plain sculpt without the background.

Fire in Far Cry 3

The fire in FarCry 3 seem to operate in a similar way to alone in the dark and seems to operate similarly to the fire in Alone in the Dark.

In Alone in the Dark the fires take place predominantly inside and in linear experiences, often as a puzzle solving method, however Farcry the game is much more open and as such the fire operates in a different way. Rather than completely destroying everything it encounters it just temporarily destroys some and has little lasting effect, it is also on a much larger scale with whole swathes of jungle being burnt. They had to take into account different factors such as how it would spread to different terrain and the effects of wind.

Very helpfully one of the developers of the game has posted parts of their method on his website,

http://jflevesque.com/2012/12/06/far-cry-how-the-fire-burns-and-spreads/

The basis for his system is a grid that is generated in line with the ground and has "hp" values for each square dependant on what the square contains. By being next to a square or a number of squares that are on fire the hp value of adjacent squares are reduced constantly, and upon reaching 0 the fire spreads. Squares that are made of water or rock are invincible.

There is a lot of focus on sacrificing realism for simplicity and fun in his tutorial. Making the results easy to predict with a very simple control system meant that players could reliably employ the fire as a weapon against the enemies in game, where as a more realistic system that took longer for the fire to spread and did so in a more complex way would have been less rewarding to the players. The fire acts in its simplest form as an environmental hazard, leaving no lasting damage on structures or the environment, either as a technichal limitation or to stop the player destroying everything important in the game.

This is one of the most important things to be taken from the tutorial in my opinion, yes the results have to be comparable to real life, but making them interesting and fun in the game is more important, especially when it can be used as a weapon in the game like this.

Fire in Alone in the Dark

The Fire in Alone in the Dark was groundbreaking for the time of release, and it could be argued that they spent a superfluous amount of time developing the fire tech and not enough time getting the game to be fun or the story to be intriguing.

From a simulation standpoint it is very interesting, the fire spreads through rooms and objects in a  fairly realistic manner, breaking objects and destroying the room as it goes. The way the fire spreads can be quite easily identified and its quite obvious to tell that it is based on a grid system as it moves through rooms.

 Another potential problem is that everything seems to break exactly in half after it has burned, not perhaps as physics would dictate. One way around this could be to use some of the nDynamics to shatter objects or in the case of the game engine to have a very simple physics simulation to find stress points in the objects and break it at the nearest pre defined points.