Tutorial: Anime style Fire in Blender

hi i'm kristoff and today we are going to have a look at building some procedural fire effects in blender for your animation projects i've built this fire after watching the movie akira if you haven't seen it i can highly recommend it it has some amazing animated effects in it and it's really a must watch for any animator out there the scope of this tutorial will be the fire effects the smoke will be explained in another tutorial i've also turned this fire into a shader and if you're just interested in trying out the fire i will leave a link in the description below so without further ado let's get started all right let's start a new blend file we're going to delete the camera delete the light we're going to keep the cube just kidding delete the cube and we're going to add a plane let's dive directly into the shader editor and we are going to add a new material we are going to delete the principled bsdf and we are going to add a emission shader the first thing we're going to add is a veronica texture and we're going to plug the distance into the color next up we will add a color wrap and we're also going to add a gradient texture let's mix the gradient texture with the voronoi so let's add a mix rgb node and we're going to plug the color into the mix and we're going to set the mix to soft light let's set the sap light to maximum and we are also going to add a color ramp after the soft light this color ramp will give us our hard edges and we can set it to constant and this will give us a very sharp edge we are going to set the voronoi to 10 on the scale and as you can see the shapes of the voronoi mixed with the gradient texture gives us already something that starts to look like flames if we add a mapping node and a texture coordinate node and we would just animate the voronoi texture you can see we can get this flame effect but we're not going to stop here we want to add another level of detail so let's add another voronoi texture and another color wrap just select all of the notes and just copy paste them in we're going to add another mix rgb node set it to a soft light and we're going to plug in the voronoi texture this time we are going to set the scale to 16 and this is going to provide us with more little details we can plug the mapping into the same texture coordinate we're going to set it to generate it for now and then we are also going to add a third layer of voronoi so let's just select the mapping voronoi color ramp copy paste them add another mix rgb node plug it in we're also going to connect it to the generated texture coordinate and this time we're going to set the scale to 8 and this is going to be a larger detail which is going to move from right to left or left to right and this is going to add a bit of extra animation to our fire let's also set the two soft light and these soft lights control the different levels of detail so we can control how much detail we want actually if we set our first soft light to a mix we can get more control over the shape of the flames so we're keep going to keep it as a mix note for now okay before we start animating this fire i want to turn it into a transparent shader so let's add a transparent bsdf let's plug it into a mix shader and let's plug our color ramp into the alpha of the mix shader we are going to invert it and then to make this transparent set blend mode to alpha clip and shadow mode i'm going to set to none because i don't use it right now the emission shader we can set to a yellow for this example i want to put a soft black line at the edge of the flames uh a bit like in the akita example and um to do this we are going to copy paste the color ramp and we're going to plug the soft light into this color ramp and then plug it into the emission shader instead of a white we're going to select a yellow and then if we move it we can get a very soft edge to our flames it's not perfect also if you use too much it's not an even line or anything but if you keep the effect very subtle i think it's quite all right all right this is the base of our fire and i think we can start animating this now let's start by animating the first level of detail of our fire we are going to add some drivers to the mapping notes and to do the upwards momentum of the fire we're going to go to the location x and we're going to type hashtag frame divided by 25 and let's press spacebar all right and we also want it to move a bit from side to side so let's add hashtag frame divided by 50 to the y location and this is going to add a slower movement so it now moves at an angle let's now go over to the mapping node of our second level of detail this time we are going to add hashtag frame divided by 40 and for the y we're going to add hashtag frame divided by 50. all right it's starting to look really nice and then for our big big details we are going to give it also some upward momentum with frame divided by 40 but we want it mostly to move side to side so we're going to add frame divided by 30 to our y location and by playing with the color ramp we can get a more dramatic effect for this one another thing we can do instead of using the color ramp is set the soft light to a multiply and this will also give a way more dramatic effect next up i want to distort the flames in the akita example um the flame is moving in a wave pattern and it distorts the flame in a fun way and to show you this i'm going to add a new plane and we are going to add an emission shader with a checker texture on it let's also add a mapping and a texture coordinate node and the checker part is just to show the distortion it's easier to see what we are doing let's add a separate x y z and a combine x y z let's plug the x into the x the z into the z and let's add a math node plug the y into the add then plug it back into the combine and we are going to add a wave texture plug the color into the add and set scale to 0.3 and this distorts our checker really nicely to control this we're going to add a mix rgb set the color to a full white and now this slider controls the level of distortion now if we animate our flame it is going to follow this distortion we also want to animate the distortion so let's add a mapping and a texture coordinate node and for the x location we are going to set a driver and set it to frame divided by 10. let's hit spacebar that looks about right but i want a distortion only to start from the second half of this plane and to do this we are going to add a gradient texture and we are going to add another mix rgb node mix in the gradient texture and we are going to set it to screen let's also add a mapping and a texture coordinate node now this already controls the lower part of our distortion but if we move the x location we can move the distortion up or lower and that's it we are going to copy these notes let's go to our flame paste them in and we are going to plug our mapping nodes into this combine xyz it seems that copy pasting has deleted our driver let's add it again hashtag frame divided by 10 i'm going to set the mix to 0.9 and i'm going to set our location back to zero and now let's press play let's delete our checker first and plus play on our fire and if i move or multiply get a bit more fire and you can see it has this waving motion i can make it more dramatic by playing around with the mix of the distortion and this is the basic uh setup for our fire shader now we can also modify the shape of our fire if we take our gradient texture and turn it into a spherical for instance and we add a mapping and texture coordinate node and set it to object we will get a ball of link i can add a vector curves and by modifying the curves i can lower this flame and then also by playing around with the scale we can get this shape and i think this is really useful if you want to use it on a plane for instance and now by controlling the mix amount of your gradient you can also modify the fire so you can get a more condensed fire and also by changing the color ramp you can go from a very small to a very big fire of course after a while you either need to reset the line or you don't need a line at all okay let's now have a look at the corridor scene that i made to look uh like the one from akira it's not going for exactly the same city but it is very much inspired by it and i used exactly the same flames as we just made you can put them inside of the puffs of smoke which gives a very cool effect and what i also did is add a bloom effect which you can find in the render properties and one of the things i want to show you is that actually the bloom effect is affected by the strength of the emission shader so if we set it to a low value you don't get a lot of blue but by ramping up the strength you can get this really glowing neon effect which is pretty cool now i also wanted to show you this uh alternative fire that i made it's the same basic setup i added another layer of voronoi as an extra level of detail and for the side to side movement i used a noise texture instead of a voronoi texture and to distort the flames this time i used a musgrave texture i can control the detail of the distortion with the detail of the muskrafe so you can see what it's doing and this gives more of a smooth flame so by playing around with different settings and different setups of noise texture i think you can get some very interesting flame effects and you can start building your own i hope this is useful for your animation projects i'm going to leave all the source files in the description please let me know if you like the tutorial in the comment section please like and subscribe and see you next time when we are going to tackle smoke effects you

Channel: Kristof Dedene

Views: 22,876

Keywords: anime, blender, animation, cartoon, toon, 2D, 3D, blender3D, watercolor, paint, handpainted, procedural, fire, fireball, candle, campfire

Id: LBT5Bue8Q2o

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020