Blender Tutorial - Realistic Fire for Still Renders

have you ever tried to render out your fire simulation as a single image and not an animation and then you notice that the fire just doesn't look that great it might look good in the animation but once you pause that and take a look at the still render you might notice that it doesn't look very realistic the main reason for this is because of the material normally when you create a fire simulation you'll turn up the black body intensity in the principled volume shader something like 10 looks pretty good now when you render out the animation it looks perfectly fine but once you render out a single image you'll notice it just doesn't look that great so today i'll be showing you how to render out fire in a still render so it looks really good to get started i'm first going to delete the default cube and then press shift a and then add in a uv sphere this is going to be our flow object i'm also going to scale it down now you could skip to this part of the video and just see what the material looks like but i'm also going to be covering a couple settings in the fire simulation come up to object down to quick effects and then add in the quick smoke this will automatically add a domain with a basic material let's go ahead and scale this up and place it somewhere around here next up i'm going to press shift a and add in a force field we're going to be adding in a turbulence force field just to give some randomness to the fire simulation over in these settings i'm going to turn the strength of this down to 0.4 and the noise amount right here i'm going to also go up to a value of 0.4 the flow object right here i'm going to select and then switch the type from smoke over to fire and then for the fuel amount i'm going to bring that up to a value of 2. for the flow source we can open up this and set the surface emission down to a value of 1. this will make sure that the fire is closer to the surface of the uv sphere next up i'm also going to enable a texture so we can determine where the fire is going to be if we come over here we can select a new texture and switch it over to clouds for the colors i'm going to bring the contrast all the way up and set the size of this down to 0.1 jumping back over to the fire simulation i'm going to select that texture in the drop down menu and that's basically all we really need to do for the fire inflow object now it's on to the domain the first thing that we have here is the resolution and how this is going to work is we're going to be taking the heat attribute in the fire material and plugging that into the emission the resolution divisions controls how much resolution you'll see in the heat attribute you'll notice in the different images on screen how it changes with a value of 128 that will look pretty good so you can set that right here but for my resolution i'm going to set it to 256. before we change that though come down to the cache setting and switch it over to the modular mode so we can actually bake this in we'll come back up here and switch this to 256 and then enter another thing that we're going to want to check is the adaptive domain make sure that is turned on so you get a much faster bake another thing we're going to take a look at is the vorticity in the fire panel you can see on the images on screen a value of about 0.1 works pretty well for most simulations if you go too high with this like a value of 1.5 you're going to get way too much detail and your fire will just look way too noisy so for this simulation i'm going to go down to 0.1 finally in the cache setting i'm going to set the end frame to 100 it doesn't need to be that long because we're rendering only a single image we want to make sure though that the end frame is long enough for the fire to actually extend all the way up here it'll probably take around 40 to 50 frames for the fire to become a normal height another thing in the fire panel is the reaction speed this is the height of the flames if we bring this lower the fire will be a lot higher let's go with a value of about 0.5 so the fire is a lot taller then finally we can bake this in make sure you turn on is resumable just in case you want to stop the bake about halfway through once you've done that you can scroll up and then click on bake data if you want to learn more about the fire and smoke simulation in blender check out my course on that exact topic we go into detail on every single one of the settings and there's a bunch of tutorials included in that course one of them being a low poly fire simulation realistic looking fire and an explosion so if you're interested view the link in the description and check it out now that the bake is done you can go ahead and go through the timeline and pick a frame that you think looks good i think frame 83 on my simulation is looking pretty good so that's the one i'm gonna go with we're gonna go over to the render settings and since we're going for a very realistic render we're gonna switch it over to the cycles render engine another reason we switched to cycles is that the heat attribute does not work in ev so you will have to use the cycle's render engine to actually use that attribute now like i said normally whenever you render fire you're going to want to turn up the black body intensity to something like 10. now that looks pretty decent but as you can see if we zoom in it just doesn't look that great there's not that much detail in the fire and if this was a still render it just wouldn't look that good so instead we're going to get rid of the blackbody intensity set that back down to zero and we're going to be adding in a attribute node if we add in the attribute node here we can type in the word heat so we can take the heat attribute from the fire simulation and plug that into the principled volume shader how this is going to work is we're going to press shift a add in a color ramp we'll take the factor from the attribute plug that in here and then take the color and plug that into the emission strength of the principled volume now if we press z and go into rendered view we should see something like this i'm going to set the density down to zero since we're not going to need that in our scene over in the color ramp we're going to take the black value and clamp down on all those extra values on the side if we drag it all the way to the right somewhere around here then we're just getting the fire simulation i'm also going to take the white value drag it a little bit closer to the black value then hit that plus sign to add in a new handle we're going to take this handle and drag it to the right and set this down to probably around here or so not completely black but somewhere pretty dark something like that once we do that now you can see there's a lot more detail in our fire to get the color we're first going to press shift a and add in a new color ramp we'll place it down here we'll take the factor plug that into the bottom and then the color is going to go into the emission color of the principled volume and then over here we can take the black value drag it closer to the white and set this over to the color that you want i'm going to go with an orange color somewhere around here and then for the white value this is going to be a lighter yellow color something like that will look pretty good now currently this is a little bit too dark so we're going to brighten up this up if we press shift a and add in a converter math node we can place that here and switch it over to the multiply mode this bottom value now controls the strength of our fire if we set that up to let's say 10 you can see we get a lot more bright colors in our fire simulation at this point i'm going to bring this a little bit closer to clamp down on those extra little bits of fire that we don't want somewhere around there then we can also switch this over to the mode ease and this will make it a smoother transition once you've done that you can come back down to the color and drag the red over a little bit closer to the orange so we get a little bit more red in our scene i'm going to go over to the world settings and bring this all the way down to black and the other important thing that we're going to want to do is go over to the render settings underneath the color management i'm going to set the look to high contrast this will make the fire look a lot better i'm also going to add in a little bit more detail to our simulation and we can do that by adding in a noise texture and taking away some parts of the fire if i press shift a we can go underneath texture and then i add in a noise texture we'll add in another color ramp so we can control this a little bit better and then finally to combine this we're going to move this over to the side select this multiply node and press shift d and place it right here then we can take the factor of the noise plug that into the color ramp and then the color into the multiply node down here now if we were to take this black value and drag it closer it's going to get rid of some random parts of our fire simulation the scale right here controls how big those spots are and i'm going to set that up to a value of 8 so they're a little bit smaller we can also bring the detail up and the distortion up to a value of 1 and then you can play around with the color amp so probably around here will look pretty good and doing this though makes the fire look a lot darker so we need to go back over to our multiply node and set this a lot higher probably around 50 or so will look good we'll come back over here and change this a little bit more something like that then all you have to do is just mess around with these settings until you get the look that you want after you render out an image here is what it looks like to make this a little bit better we can exit out of here and go over to the compositing workspace we can able use nodes and then drag this over to the left and then add in a glare node by pressing shift a going under filter glare and place it here to see what we're doing we can also press control and shift and then left click on the glare node and this will add in a viewer node i'm going to press v a couple times to zoom out so we get the whole thing in view then i'm going to switch it over to the fog glow the threshold controls how much glow there is and if you want more you're going to want to turn this down if we set the threshold 2.1 and the size to 9 here is the result that we get and as you can see that looks pretty good so to compare what this looks like if we take a look at the principled volume with the uh blackbody intensity you can see there is not that much detail in the fire but if we take the heat attribute and do everything that we just did with the color ramps this is the result that we get and as you can see this looks a lot better and this is going to look 10 times better for a still render but there you go that is how you create a really cool looking fire for still renders thank you very much for watching this tutorial if you learned something new or created your own simulation i would love to see it so make sure to send it to me on instagram at blendermadez if you're new to this channel consider subscribing because i upload blender tutorials all the time thanks again for watching and i will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Blender Made Easy

Views: 32,637

Keywords: blender, fire, blender tutorial, tutorial, smoke, simulaton, animation, beginner, realistic, fire simulation, 3d, cycles, eevee, render, how to, blendermadeeasy, blender made easy, still, mantaflow, quick smoke, fire simulation blender tutorial, smoke simulation

Id: rzATaYyCf9Q

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021