Maya VFX Series: Candle Flame Effect

hello guys welcome to another effects series video in this session we're gonna cover how to create a realistic candle flame in my using 3d containers so as you can see that's the final result that I've put together and we are going to achieve that in the quickest way possible so without any further ado let's dive right in alright here's the scene in Maya very simple scene that I've put together there's not much to it really if I show you it from perspective it's pretty much just a disk with few simple objects I have two parts to this week the first one is the base which I'm not going to add fluid to and the second part is the main the overall measurement for this is around 10 cm so you can see the grid I try to stay in the ballpark of realistic measurements so and it's a simple candle it's not something too too big but just keep that in mind that everything in fluid simulation can change the behavior of the fluid can change based on the scale of your scene say for triple the the size of this scene I may change a few things along the way all right so let's get to in really quick first things first is to make sure that I am in the effects menu set then I'm gonna go to fluid 3d container going to reset the settings I'm gonna keep everything same I don't need any emitter because I want fluid to get emitted from the bleak the model so I'm just gonna say close and apply this is too big I need to bring it to the position so I'm just gonna do that also the size of it is too big so let's change the size to begin with ten by ten by ten definitely it's way too big I'm gonna reduce this to may two three and two and if I need to change that before I make my connections I can definitely do that I need to bring it up Translate voice and set it to something like eight units in positive Y and that should do it I'm gonna switch back to fluid shape container and this is something that we discussed in torch flame video if you haven't checked that out I go through more details and I assume you already know little bit of basics about contents details but if you don't make sure to check that video out I put the link up on the screen now are we going to increase the base resolution to something like sixty because we would like to get something to begin with otherwise we won't be able to see anything and now let's make the connection because because if I press play I'm not gonna see anything there is no fluid in here there is no ammeter in here so selecting the from the outliner I'm going to select the quick main shift select the container I'm gonna go to flue it and add from object or rather emit from object I'm gonna call it source as I usually do apply and close now if I go and check I do see a small touch of fluid might change the background so it's visible yep with that I do need to simplify the look of this container so I don't want to see the resolution here so I'm gonna go and select the fluid and go to its display and send the bounding draw to bounding box later on I'm gonna probably set it to none at all I can do it right now even and can't basically get this over with a slice per voxel this higher values in this produce more detail but reduce the speed and you won't get that in the render so I usually lower it down so let's see what we're getting yeah it's definitely much easier to see now now I've gotta go to a meter which is now under the geometry that I have from the outliner what I don't have is enough rate enough density and usually I tweak that via basic emitter attribute on the emitter node via rate percentage and hundred is usually very very low I'm gonna start with 600 I might bump it up even 2,000 based on the number of fluid or the amount of fluid I would like to see that's much better now you can see it's bouncing and then because I said boundaries to both sides it's basically bounces on the sides and off the of the top of the fluid now while I have this menu here you know that I do drop down the fluid drop off to zero basically you're setting drop off value for fluid emission and I do do not wish to have any drop off value in here also while I'm in this window let's set the fuel method to no emission because we're not using any fuel now I'm not going to tweak fluid emission turbulence and emission speed attribute since I do not want to have initial velocity or inherit velocity for that matter this is that this has to be a very tamed especially formed type of fluid and as soon as you enable those then you're dealing with more of a steam or smoke looking fluid rather than a flame fluid so I try to stay away from those for the effect that I'm going with for this tutorial now with that done I'm gonna go back to fluid and collapse display and go to my contents detail density as you know this is a very important submenu and as I said many times you need to master these attributes over time there are few very important attributes that you almost always need to tweak and we are going to go through some of them for this tutorial now for buoyancy I need more buoyancy I'm gonna set it to 5 for dissipation I want my fluid to dissipate not to go to infinity obviously so I'm gonna set this a patient to 1 I need a tad of diffusion and we do need diffusion usually for candle flames effect usually I advise against that for other types of fires but for candle definitely diffusion can can help maybe point 1 would be a good starting point and for the first time I'm gonna use this attribute tension which I really like tension pushes density into rounder shapes make the density boundary more define in the fluid and as a result of that makes the fluid look taller now one thing you need to be mindful of is we are going to use turbulence for the majority of this tutorial and you can set these attributes to whatever you want and you may not even see it in the render because you do see temperature but I still need to tweak that for my opacity column in the shading submenu now if I go and for now I'm seeing density anyways look at that with small detail and with small adjustment we do see the shape of the fluid I quite like that actually the reason that we're getting such soft and tamed flame is because of the diffusion surprisingly if I turn off diffusion you can see we're still going back to the flame that when you can see how powerful this blurring effect is and we do need that for our candle flame effect now before I go to temperature and make some adjustment there I think I need to pay a visit to dynamic simulation and dynamic simulation attributes in here helped me to get a much better result and form the fluid much better and it has an effect and impact on both density and temperature so let's set it down to very low value point zero seven five which is considered an okay value and almost like about a medium close to high value for damp because it suppresses the flow in the container and very small value can make a huge difference I increased substep to three this number increases the number of calculation per frame obviously and solver quality to something like thirty five and that increases the number of steps also while I have this window open here I may want to increase simulation rate scale it does scale the time step using in a mission and solving so you increase this your simulation occurs faster I'm gonna go with I don't know maybe two point seven five I can't even use three yeah that's much better now I think it's time for me to pay a visit to temperature attributes and tweak some of the attributes there so let's go to content details and temperature now you can see that this is not on now the reason that it's not on because if I go to contents method you can see temperature is set to zero so we have to make sure that we have dynamic grid on so temperature gets calculated and based on that if I go back you can see the attributes are no longer grayed out which is great now before I actually tweet that I think I need to make a small change to my emitter fluid attribute so if I go and select the source which is my emitter and fluid a few method now in here heat method set to ad which is correct I am going to increase this more we don't need to worry about density so I'm not gonna even do that so usually for fire I do polish this attribute I may change it later but let's start with a good starting point which is one point three in this example now I'm gonna go back to my fluid and let's make some changes in here now temperature scale of one sends good let's go to buoyancy I do need lots of buoyancy so I'm gonna start with something like 70 or 60 dissipation I want my temperature to dissipate and diffusion of one is enough I don't want to increase this value too much because simply it makes shading process more difficult it makes the whole look of a to blur I do add a touch of turbulence in here I will add a real turbulence by a turbulence note or you know even a an external force field to our balance but for now just just a little bit of that to get a little bit of movement so it's not completely rigid and tension of 0.25 will do just fine so I'm just going to reply we don't see much of a difference obviously because we're still mostly looking at the density so let's go and have a look at our shading a lot happens here every time you deal with fire so I'm going to set transparency to maybe point 1 5 here's a my reference and you can see the flow the coloration the size of the flame and it makes a huge difference and that's the that's the type of coloration that I'm going to apply using shading rollout for transparency and again it's quite an opaque effect so I made even reduce transparency more we do need to have drop-off for that that is actually a very very important attribute that I always change obscene artists use sphere and cube I tend to use Y gradient and Y gradient is going to look at the y-axis and it's going to start fading the base of my fire which is usually the case so when you change that then you definitely need to change the edge drop-off as well because 0.5 0 is very very very low so maybe 0.46 and that defines the fall of region and fluid a won't take place in those areas at all so if I do that you can see it kind of eats in the fluid from both ends from the tip and from the very end of my fluid and again it would be we going back to and we're going back to dissipation and these are the attributes that you need to constantly change to get that sweet spot the result that you want and these are not all guests these are all figures that I've already play around with you can rely on them if you're seeing scale matches mind but obviously you kinda need to know what each attribute does before you change them so let's see what we're getting not too bad for color I tend to mm0 that out switch back to zero because I really don't want to see density I'm not interested in density I'm more interested in incandescent and soon enough we need to bring up a render window to just see the feedback via our IPR I never ever rely on what I see in the viewport now before I go to incandescent there is one more attribute I would like to change on my fluid and that not not the emitter but the fluid container and that is a little bit of velocity so I'm just gonna introduce just a tad of swirl now I'm going to bring my eight conditions window and I'm just gonna increase the pace of the video and mute the microphone you'll see the end result at the end you so that should do it now I'm going to set my input bias to something like point nine so you kind of see the the flame now without content bias you really don't see much so it that it that attribute does push the look of of what you see because pretty much it this value is a sense of sensitivity of the color input so you need to make sure that that number is high enough just so you know this incandescent won't be affected by any shadowing so I may go in in lighting and enable self shadow and set it to a very high value I really don't see much of a change even I can make changes here still may not be able to see things the way I want now if I go and play I get my lovely shape back but if I render I may not be able to see the pattern that I want so let's do a quick test render with Arnold so I'm gonna I'm gonna go to Arnold render so as you can see the look is almost there but I do not have enough intensity now let's go to opacity and change a few things in opacity and it makes a huge difference to what we do so let's bring up the opacity and I'm gonna set the bias input to something like 0.5 1 and you can see as soon as you do that you will get some really nice result of course the pattern is off and that's what we're going to fix with this value here so let's do that really quick you now as you can see we are getting a much better result using the opacity and that shows how important this value is or this drop down heirs to shape the flame that we have now I think we're reaching the point where I'm getting all the coloration that I want so for the most part the look of my candle is done what I need to do now is to give it a little bit of interaction and interactivity to do that I can easily use my fluid container and go into content detail there are two attributes that I can keyframe to get the desirable look the first one is the buoyancy that I can keyframe over time and get the look that I want and the other one is strength for turbulence that I can animate and get the result so I've gone ahead and just applied random keyframe on those two on those two attributes just to show you for the turbulence I used really subtle values so from frame 1 to 35 no turbulence from 35 to 50 point 3 turbulence strength and from 50 to 65 down to 0 65 to 80 no turbulence 80 to 90 only 0.15 value for turbulence and from 90 to 0 just 0.15 and you can just change them you don't see much of a difference as long as your values are around the same ballpark don't use a very high value otherwise you see some really unpredictable movements now that's for turbulence for buoyancy in my temperature I used much values so from zero to 25 the initial value was 70 and I reduced it to 60 25 to 50 I jumped it from 60 doubled the value to 120 from 50 to 60 decreased from 120 to 80 60 to 90 again increased the number from 80 to 120 and from 9200 I used 120 to 70 and then in graph editor I cycled them so it's going to loop you don't need to worry about the rest of it you can set it to 300 and this value will loop and there's not much repetitiveness that anyone can noticed about them so that's how i keyframed them now I've already gone ahead and cashed them as well so if you go to effects and cash create new cash maya fluid I've cashed this render already of rendered hundred and fifty frames of this JPEG nothing special no motion blur and let's have a look at the post that I've done for this and it's just a couple of notes that I added in Nuuk to add that glow to the end result so let's have it have a look at that now here's a super simple note tree that I put together in nuke yes you can actually you can go ahead and use a Ovie's to have subsurface scattering on a path have the flame on another pass using render setup and render layers but again the idea for me just to show you attributes inside my using fluid container so that part of it can be another tutorial for one glow if I disable the second glow the first glow just looks at the overall look so adds a little bit of more glow around the the flame itself and I did that using a tolerance a little bit of brightness and changing the size for the second glow which is going to add more ambient type of glow to it again I tweak tint tolerance and brightness full saturation and that's the result I achieved I wrote the whole thing as sequence back again and that's what you are going to see as final result and this is the final look a a sample of 5 subsurface sample 3 I hope you enjoyed this tutorial subscribe if you would like to see more tutorials and I would like to hear your feedback as well thank you very much and see you in the next video

Channel: SARKAMARI

Views: 15,210

Keywords: Autodesk Maya, Flame in Maya, Fluid Simulation Maya, Candle Flame in Maya, Reza Sarkamari, Maya Effects, Fire Effects

Id: xE66r1gfctE

Length: 26min 9sec (1569 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020