Blender Tutorial - How to Create a Fire Trail

hello everybody and welcome back to another blender made easy tutorial today i'm going to be showing you how to create a fire trail using mantiflow and dynamic paint to achieve this we're going to be using a curve and we're going to have an object follow this curve and we're going to be using that in the dynamic paint and then from there we're going to be importing that data into the fire simulation if none of that made sense to you don't worry we're going to go step by step and i'll show you exactly how to do it first off we need to create the outline of where the fire simulation is going to be to do this we're going to be using a curve i'm going to go ahead and press x and delete the default cube and then press shift a and we're going to be adding in a reference image what i want to do is actually trace out the blender logo so just go over to google and type in blender logo and you'll find the image that i used select it and then go load reference image we can see that it loaded in at this angle we don't want this we want it to be flat on the ground so i'm going to hit alt g and then alt r to snap it to the grid just like that from there we can go into top view by pressing 7 and then i'll zoom in i'm going to press shift a and we're going to go over to curve and then bz or curve then i'll go into edit mode and then press g to move and place it over here make sure you are in edit mode so the the origin point is still at the center then we're going to select these points and then rotate them and start tracing out this logo so this part is a little bit tedious but all you have to do is just select one of the handles rotate them scale them down a little bit select a different handle rotate it and then place it along the logo just like this and if the reference image is too visible what you can do is select it go over to this panel the image panel right here use transparency and then bring the opacity down a little bit this will help you see the curve a little bit better so once you once you've done that select the curve again and just start extruding it and placing it in just like this so what i'm going to do now is actually fast forward this bit because it is a little bit tedious it's just the same thing scaling rotating all the way around and once we get up to this part i'll show you how to do this circle once you get over to this corner right here what i like to do is scale down the curve handle really small and place it on that corner and then press either extrude and drag it out this way having it really small will make it a tight angle as you can see there so place it like this and then for here since this is a straight line we can just drag this all the way over to right about here make sure you leave it about halfway through because this is where we're going to transition over to this side all right once you have gotten to this point what we're gonna do is actually select both of these handles go into front view by pressing one and extrude them down we'll place them right about there and then we'll go back into top view then we're going to extrude it going along this way to this spot the reason why we're going down is because when we apply the dynamic paint an object is going to paint along this curve it'll go from here go down cut across and then come back up over here we don't want there to be a line between this point and this point we want it to be underneath now that we've extruded it down we can press e to extrude and drag it out this way you also want to make sure that these points are pretty close together so i'll select both of them and just scale them inwards a little bit so they're closer together like that and then over on this point once we've reached this circle we can go back into edit mode i'll rotate these around this way so they're facing the right direction like this and then we'll extrude both of these so select them both go into front view press e to extrude and drag them up till they're the same height as the other part of the curve right about there and then it's just the same thing we're just going to extrude them and then go around this circle so i'll select at this point right here and then i'll extrude it out this way rotate it so it's facing the right direction looks like that is good scale it up and then place it along this part of the logo [Music] once you have gone all the way around select both the handles at the end and then press f to fill in a face right there now they are connected so now this curve is one solid loop it goes all the way around and there we go we've now created the logo traced out with a curve the next step is to apply an object to follow this curve i'm going to press shift a and add in a mesh and then a uv sphere we'll scale this uv sphere down and just leave it right at the center it doesn't really matter where it's at next up we're going to go over to the constraints tab which is this tab right here click add constraint and then follow path if we select the bezier curve with the target right here select the bezier curve now we can see it's on that point i'll scale it down even more what we can do next is click on animate path and now this object will follow this curve if i hit the space bar we can see exactly what it's doing and this is what it looks like now when i first started making this simulation a friend pointed out to me that fire doesn't go in one direction it actually spreads in both directions so what we need to do is actually duplicate both of these objects and have another object going in the opposite direction i'm going to scale this uv sphere down just a little bit more so what we're going to do is select both of these objects the curve and the uv sphere shift d them and then right click make sure you name these so you know exactly what you're doing so the bezier curve here we're going to go with curve and then left and then this curve will be curve and then right because it's going to go in the opposite direction same thing over here this first uv sphere is going to be left and the second uv sphere is going to be right another thing that we need to do is with the second curve the curve left we can see these arrows are going in the right direction we don't want this we don't want them to be going in the opposite direction so to flip a direction of a curve you can select everything right click and then click on switch direction once we do this you will notice the arrows are pointing in this direction and that is what we want so now once we restart the animation and hit the space bar you will notice the uv spheres are going in opposite directions next up they're currently going way too fast so i'm going to select the curve left and then go over to the curve settings under path animation you will notice this value here this controls the amount of frames that it'll take to go around the entire loop i want this to be pretty slow so i'm going to set this to 300. select curve right and set it to the exact same number 300 so now that we've set up the frame number we're going to go ahead and position the uv spheres on the curve where we want so what we can do is select them go over to the constraints tab and here we have an offset this controls where it is on the curve when it starts i want them to be both down here and then i want them to go in either direction at the same time so what we can do is actually set the offset all the way to here we'll select this uv sphere as well bring up the offset until it's all the way to there now if we play the simulation you can see this is what it looks like now another thing that we want to do is have them meet at this spot at the same time so we can see here this object is at this spot way before this one so we need to mess with the offset a little bit more if we select this object i'm going to restart the simulation we probably need to position both of them over here so i'm going to drag this one over to the left then we'll select this one drag it even further down here and then we'll try this if i play this we can see they split at the same time and then we can see here it still is a little bit too fast so what we can do is just restart it position it a little bit more to the left so bring it down this way select the other one bring it over here and that should be good and this is what it looks like they go all the way around the logo they meet at that spot and then split at the same time so now that we've set up our animation we can set up the dynamic paint so first off we actually need an object to paint on i'm going to select the reference image and just press h to hide it we're not going to need it anymore and then i'm going to press shift a and add in a plane scale this plane up to be about the same size as the logo so right about there is good now what we need to do is actually subdivide this plane so i'm going to go into edit mode right click and select subdivide if we open up this panel down at the bottom right here we can set the number of cuts up to a higher value let's try 75. that looks pretty good but we still need a little bit more so i'm just going to right click and subdivide that whole thing and now we have a lot more geometry to work with what we can do next is apply the dynamic paints so if we go over to the physics tab with the plane selected i'm going to click on dynamic paint make sure the type is set to canvas and click on add canvas the format we're going to leave at vertex and now what we need to do is find where they meet so it looks like they meet right about here at frame 50 151 so what we're going to do is set the end frame in the dynamic paint to 151 we also need to turn up the substeps and what this does is it will calculate fast moving objects now these uv spheres aren't moving extremely fast but we should bring this up just in case it misses a couple of spots so for the sub steps let's try a value of five i think that's pretty good and that's all we really need to do the surface type we don't want paint we actually want weight because this is what we're going to be using in the fire simulation underneath the output make sure you add in a new vertex group if you don't do this this is not going to work so make sure you click that plus sign underneath the cache settings if we open up this panel you will notice it's completely grayed out the reason for this is because we have not saved our project yet so what we can do is press ctrl s and i'll save it to this folder and once we do that you can see the cache is now visible before we bake this in we also need to create the paint brushes and in this case is going to be these uv spheres select them dynamic paint set the type over to brush and click add brush and that's basically all we really need to do select the other one as well dynamic paint set the type over to brush add brush and there we go and now that we've done that we can select our plane right here scroll down to the cache settings and then click on bake we can see here it bakes pretty fast and now once we apply the fire simulation we can select that vertex group that we just created i'm going to go ahead and close off this tab then we'll create the fire simulation go over to object down to quick effects and then click on quick smoke and this will automatically add a domain for us this is currently way too big though so i'm going to scale it down this way and then press s and z and scale it down this way so it's a lot smaller we don't need that big of a domain the resolution that i'm going to use is a value of 128 for my final animation at the beginning of the video i actually used 256 but that does take quite a long time to bake and render so for this tutorial we're going to be using 128 i'm also going to turn on adaptive domain and this will speed up the baking time as well the verticity of the smoke we're going to drag up to a value of 0.3 so it adds some more swirls into the smoke underneath the fire we are going to change the colorful up settings here first off we're going to be using a texture for the inflow and this will make the flames a lot shorter so what we need to do to counteract that is actually make the flames taller over here so i'm going to set this to a value of 0.7 and this will bring the height of the flames up a little bit the vorticity of the flames i'm going to bring up to a value of 0.8 and this will give them more swirls and more randomness also one thing to note is if your bake button is missing and i've gotten a lot of comments about that the reason the big button is missing is because of the type right now it's set to replay this means if i play my simulation it'll actually play in real time i've noticed though when using the replay option is it's very inconsistent and doesn't give accurate results so i recommend switching over to modular and this will give you your bake button right here and this will give you a lot more accurate results the end frame right here we're going to be setting up to a value of 180 because the simulation lasts to 150 i want about 30 frames extra to just view the logo the end frame right here i'm also going to set to 180 and now that we've done that we can mess with the inflow object select the plane and then come over to the flow type and set it over to fire the flow behavior we're going to leave at inflow make sure you use that and not geometry and then underneath the vertex group select the vertex group that we just created for the dynamic paint this will give us the spot of the plane that will actually have the fire underneath the texture make sure you enable this and we're going to create a new texture and this will give the fire a much more realistic look if we go over to the texture panel we can create a new one the type we're going to be using clouds the size of the texture is currently way too big and this will give us some really splotchy look to the fire so we need to bring this down i'm going to try a value of 0.1 going back over to the physics tab we're going to select that texture in the texture panel right here and then the size of this we're also going to bring down to a value of 0.5 one more thing that we need to do with this texture is to offset it currently it's in the exact same position and it's gonna be like that through the entire animation and this will not look very good so what we need to do is actually offset this so the texture will move around as the simulation plays make sure you're on frame 1 and then click this little button on the side to add in a keyframe go all the way to the end of the animation frame 180 and set the offset up to a value of 0.8 then add another keyframe whenever you animate something in blender the default way of the interpolation is a curve this will smooth out the animation so it will start out slow speed up and then slow down at the end with this texture though that will look pretty strange on our fire so we need to make sure this is linear to fix this open up the graph editor switching this over to the graph editor right here this is our curve so you can see here it starts out slow speeds up and slows down at the end to switch it over to a straight line we can press t and click on linear now it's a constant rate going all the way across the last thing that we can do to make our simulation look a little bit more realistic is to add in some wind i'm going to press shift a and go underneath a force field and then click on wind go into front view by pressing one and then rotate this 90 degrees just like this so the wind is going in this direction over in the physics tab you can set the strength right here i'm going to bring this down to a value of 0.5 i'm also going to animate this so i'm going to click i while hovering over the strength over in the graph editor we can see this is our animation it's staying at 0.5 through the entire animation what we can do is press n and add a modifier to this to give it some more randomness over in the modifier tab if we click add modifier and noise now we can see this is what it looks like this value here controls the scale we need to drag this up a lot bigger something like this the strength of this if we drag this up we can see the curve becomes a lot bigger i'm going to bring it up to a value of 1.1 so basically what's gonna happen is the strength of this wind is gonna be at point four at the start it's gonna go down to almost zero then it's gonna go up to almost one and it's going to be random throughout the entire animation this will give it a cool effect when we actually simulate the fire you also want to be careful with the strength value that you don't go underneath a zero because it'll become a negative value and the wind will actually go in the opposite direction i want the wind to be always in this direction but i want to make sure the strength is random and now that we've done that we can bake in our simulation i'm going to go ahead and close off this tab select the domain and then click on bake data make sure you save your project before you do this just in case it crashes and bake data the bake has now finished if we play our simulation this is what it looks like as you can see the fire does look pretty good there is a lot of randomness in the texture the wind is giving it a cool effect and i think it looks pretty sweet if we skip all the way to the end we can see the blender logo right there and it looks pretty cool the next step is to set up the lighting and material for the fire before we do that let's organize our scene a little bit because we have a lot of objects on the right i'm going to create a new collection and i'm going to drag the two cylinders the two curves and the empty right here the image reference drag them all into this collection and then i'll close that off i'm also going to hide that from the view and if we open up this menu and select the camera icon we can also hide it from the rendered view as well next up select the domain and then go over to the material tab if we open up the volume this is what our current material looks like i'm also going to be using cycles for this animation because i find that it looks much better than ev if we go into render view this is what it currently looks like we don't have any fire to fix this we need to turn up the black body intensity if i drag this all the way to a value of 10 now we can see the fire in our scene and it looks pretty cool to make this render a little bit faster we can also turn off the density of the smoke to a value of zero and this will get rid of it entirely and just leave the fire next up i'm going to select the lamp in our scene and press x and delete it this next part took a little bit too long so i decided to speed it up and just talk over it basically i just added an hdr i set the strength to a value of about 0.1 so it darkens up the whole scene and then what i did next was add in a plane scale it up a little bit position the camera above the fire drag it back and as you can see there this is what it looks like for the render settings i'm going to bring the render sampling to 50 because i do want this to render pretty quickly and i'm also going to go underneath the render layers panel and turn on the noising data now if we go over to the compositor we can click on use nodes we can see a lot more options in the render layers we have noisy image d noise right here and albedo i'm going to press shift a and add in a filter and then a denoise right here we're going to take the noisy image plug that into the denoise the normal and then the albedo and plug that in right there if we then take the image and plug that into the composite now there will be no noise in our render and it will look much better the next step is to set an output of where you want your animation to go to i just selected this folder and i'm also going to be rendering this out as pngs we're not going to be using a movie file just in case blender crashes or i need to stop the render using an image sequence we can always start at the frame that we left off once you're happy with all of your settings and your output you can go over to render and then click on render animation this will bring up a new window and it will start to render out our scene the render has finished and if we exit out of this window we can go over to render and then click on view animation it will take all of those images and play the animation for us in real time and here is the results as you can see it looks pretty cool so there you go guys that is how you create a fire trail in blender if you want to learn how to render those images into a movie file i will put a link down in the description where you can learn that but that's going to be it for this tutorial thank you for watching if you enjoyed or created your own animation i would love to see it so make sure to send it to me over on instagram at blendermadeeasy if you have suggestions for other tutorials you would like to see make sure you comment down below that's going to be it thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Blender Made Easy

Views: 46,825

Keywords: blender, tutorial, 2.8, 2.83, blender tutorial, blender animation, mantaflow, fire, smoke, simulation, beginner, animation, curve, dynamic paint, constraints, b3d, blendermadeeasy, blender made easy, fire simulation, eevee, cycles, blender 2.8, blender 3d

Id: iW71S5Q3kLM

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020