Epic Rocket Engine Fire Effect (Procedurally) in Blender | Tutorial

foreign what's up everybody welcome back to the channel so I know it's been a while but I am back today with a new tutorial on how to create this really cool rocket fire effect in blender completely procedurally this works in both Eevee and Cycles if you don't have the time to build it yourself don't worry you can get this for one dollar over on my gum Road and it's all put together into this nice really simple Shader node it lets you control the throttling amount the amount of turbulence the number of these really cool shock cones the brightness and of course the leading and trailing colors of the exhaust but with that Shameless plug out of the way I'm going to show you all how to build the thing I just tried to sell to you so for this tutorial I've just got this nice little scene set up here I have this really cool rocket engine model that I got for free online link to that in the description below then I just added this simple rectangle here at the end that we're going to actually use to build our volume Shader one thing though that you're going to want to make sure you do is apply all of your transforms so that way when we're building the Shader everything will look exactly the same now with that done I'm just going to hop over into my shading workspace and the first thing I'm going to do is for this tutorial I'm going to be working in Cycles you'll want to click GPU compute if you have a GPU I did add a simple hdri I just got for free online to add a little bit of reflection to the engine and if you want to hide your hdri simple tip just come down here to film click this down and check transparent the last thing I'm going to do is adjust my look down here at the bottom and set this to high contrast I'll create a new material and let's rename this to rocket engine fire now let's go ahead and delete the principal bsdf shift a and add in a principled volume control shift click to plug this into the right slot and you're going to want to make sure you have the node Wrangler add-on installed in order to do that you just have to come up to edit preferences add-ons and you can search up here it comes in blender by default just make sure that it's checked on now the nice thing is that we can actually set our density to zero because I'm not going to add any really like smoke to the Shader I'm just going to be dealing with the emission strength now the first thing I want to do is to create a sort of oscillating texture so that way we can make our shock cone effect to do this I'm going to start with a gradient texture then Ctrl T to bring up these texture coordinate and mapping nodes then you can just plug this color output into the emission strength now if you rotate around you'll see that the gradient is actually going sort of side to side instead of back to front like we want it easy solution just come down here to the rotation and set the rotation on the Z to minus 90. there we go now shift a and you're going to want to grab a math node for this we're going to use a sort of Niche function called modulo over here and as you can see when we adjust this value it basically just causes the texture to snap back to zero at a certain point so for example if I set this to 0.1 then once the texture gets to a value of 0.1 it snaps back down to zero and then continues back up so we get this sort of saw like effect now I'm going to set this to 0.25 for now but the other thing I want to do is I want to make sure that this goes from zero to one still so I'm going to grab a map range node and I'm going to grab a value node type 0.25 into here plug this into the value slot on your modulo and the from Max slot on your map range and now no matter what value we put in here it still goes from zero to one now you're just going to slide these over and you're going to want to add in a float curve node this will let us change this from sort of like a pulsing saw blade of gas to more of a nice smooth fall off I'll set my endpoints to 0.5 I think and then this point in the center you can set the x position to 0.5 and leave your vertical position as one now you can see we get this nice oscillating effect now the next trick is going to be taking this and basically un rectangling it because as you can see now it's like a rectangular plume but we obviously want it to be like a cylinder coming out the back so I'll slide this over then I'm going to shift d on my gradient texture bring it back up here again change my rotation back to zero zero zero and switch this from linear to quadratic sphere now if I plug this color into the emission strength instead you'll see we get something that we're looking for but we do have to adjust our mapping coordinates now in order to get the gradient to be in the center of my object and this works for any material or any object that's dealing with a gradient you're going to have to set your location to negative one half of whatever your scale is so if I adjust my location to minus 0.5 for all my values you can see now it's in like the center versus just being sort of off in the corner now in this case I really want more of like a cylinder rather than a sphere so what I'm going to actually do is scale on the X and Y by a factor of two and then adjust the location coordinates accordingly so that way I can have again more of like a cylinder rather than having a sort of spherical look if you bring in a color ramp then you can adjust to get it sort of fitting more in line with your engine also never be afraid to touch this setting here on your color ramp the interpolation sometimes just adjusting this can do a lot of favors for your material in this case I'll go with ease you really can't see any difference here but in a lot of other cases it's really noticeable and can add a lot more depth to your texture now the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add one more control point slide this over and I'm going to set it to black as well and you can see this gives us more of like an outline for the emission which is more realistic because real rocket engines you're going to have gas and Flame shooting more toward the edges and then being funneled out the back rather than just shooting straight out now with that done let's add in our oscillating effect so I'm going to add in a second mapping node right between the first and the gradient texture then I'm going to grab my procedural oscillation setup here shift a grab a combine XYZ and a math node set your math node to divide and plug this value output into the bottom slot then set the Top Value to 1 plug this into the x and z slots and set your y to 1. now if we plug this into our scale you'll see it's scaling down here at certain points to give us our sort of shock cone effect I'm actually going to slide this over a little bit further though because the other thing I want to do is you can see it gets darker here at the points where it shrinks down but in reality it actually gets a lot brighter and you sort of get these diamonds in the center that's I think actually that's the real term is a shock diamond but easier way to add that just hit Ctrl shift d and duplicate this texture you can get rid of the color ramp there plug this color into the emission strength then if we just Ctrl shift d our divide and combine nodes plug this into here and grab a color ramp we can invert our effect and now we get these sort of shock cones so you're going to want to set this to some value other than zero because we're plugging this into a divide node and so you're trying to divide by zero and math doesn't like that so just set your value to something like .001 and that'll eliminate that effect you can also slide up your black levels to sort of cut them off a little bit I like to add just a little bit of Gap there now if we grab a math node and just add these two together we get a really nice looking effect I'm also going to multiply the strength of my diamonds just because in real life that is where the brightest parts are if you want to adjust the position of your cones though the easiest trick I have found is just coming back to your gradient texture here grabbing our good old friend the math node and if you add a certain amount to this all it does is offset the position of your cones note this does have to be a positive value otherwise it kind of screws with the modulo function so like in this case I don't really want it to have this tiny sharp point when it's in the engine I kind of want it to be really close to the outside of the Bell so I can just add a little bit and now it's just right there at that outline I'm also going to adjust how many cones I have I think something like that looks pretty good 0.38 adjust my setting here again and there we go now to set the color of the emission I'm just going to grab again a gradient texture that's basically the running theme of this video is just different ways to use the gradient texture and I'm going to plug the color into the emission color again you'll have to rotate the gradient texture by minus 90. grab a color ramp and now you can sort of just pick whatever color you like personally I like to go for sort of like a bluish here near the bell and then almost like a reddish pink sort of color here maybe something like that desaturate it just a touch that looks pretty good now the other thing I'm going to do is just multiply my emission strength there we go something like that and to make this look a lot more like fire I'm gonna grab a good old noise texture bring this on up here Ctrl t shift a grab another math node set it to multiply and plug the factor for my noise texture into here then you can just adjust these settings as you like personally I like to go with a nice sort of medium area maybe add in a bunch more detail and I'm actually going to keep my roughness kind of low just so that you can sort of notice the gaps a little bit easier the other thing you can do to animate this is one option is just setting this to 4D and adjusting the W value but the thing I like a lot more is to grab a value node set this here and again grab the combine XYZ node then you'll notice that if we control this y position of the noise texture we can make it flow like uh left to right so if I plug my combine XYZ into here and then come to my value node and type hashtag frame this will input the value of the current frame so if I just multiply this by minus 5 or so because it's going to be moving obviously really really fast plug this into the Y slot and hit space to play you can see now I get this nice sort of animation I'll add in a color ramp again and once again we're going to adjust these interpolation settings I'm going to go with a B spline this just sort of acts like a much smoother gradient but also allows you to have some harsh spots and so that's really nice I think I'll do something maybe like this and I'm actually going to up my scale a bit then I'm going to come over here to my texture coordinates and I'm going to grab a mix node I'll set this to vector then I'm going to grab another noise texture plug the color into slot B slide this a little bit so that way it's just another level of distortion for our noise set the detail higher roughness a bit lower and there we go I really really really like that actually now one last thing I want to do is I want to make sure that the intensity falls off as the fire comes out so for that one last time I believe I'm gonna grab my gradient texture Ctrl t rotate on the Z grab a math node multiply plug my factor into here and grab a float curve and then you can just use this to control the fall off for the intensity so I like to go with something I don't know maybe a bit more quadratic I think that just adds a lot more realism and then I'm going to come in here and I'm gonna adjust the overall intensity and brightness grab a math node set this to multiply do something like that and now I'm just going to adjust my brightness settings again I think I'm going to adjust my shock cones to be even brighter more noticeable and I'm going to add in a separate multiply node just after this color ramp so that I can adjust sort of like the outline intensity at this point it is largely just sort of fiddling with your noise values to get what you like for my color I did end up going with again A B spline interpolation to give a slightly more realistic look again at this point it's pretty much all just artistic in nature so you can pick whatever you like one thing though to really sell the effect and this is just an absolutely important thing is actually on the camera side so if I head back into my layout one thing to really sell the fire is that you don't actually just want your fire to be oscillating to look powerful the other thing you want to do is you want to make your camera Shake just a little bit so if you come over here and say add a couple keyframes on the z-axis and the y-axis you can leave these as the same value but if you click on modifiers over here you can add noise and so if you add this decrease the strength significantly and then adjust the scale however you like then that gives that real like rumbling effect that you'd see if you really had a camera that was like right next to a rocket engine so yeah that's all for the video guys thank you all so much for watching again if you want to get the pre-built rocket fire Shader that's available on my gumroad link in the description below it's also a way you can support the channel if you want to do that and either way thank you guys so much for watching uh like subscribe all that YouTube jazz if you enjoyed this and I'll hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Alaskan FX

Views: 17,546

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Id: Z8iVtb5U9NI

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023