FXWars! Bonfire

This was another CGSociety challenge I took part in, I had a little bit of free time so thought I would give it a go. The brief was to make a bonfire, so I gathered a bunch of reference images from the internet to decide on the type of fire I wanted to build. For this challenge I wanted to keep it simple, something that was manageable so that I could finish on time as well as something that looked good.

I started by creating the scene, made a quick landscape and modeled up some logs and pallets, textured them and placed them in my scene. Instead of having a stationary camera I just had it tracking back very slowly and then I setup the lighting for the scene.

I then jumped into Fumefx to make the fire, using greyscale maps to fuel the fire which gave me a bit more control of the flames. There were 2 fumefx grids used, one was for the logs themselves and then another was for the ground, in the heart of the bonfire.

I rendered out the scene with its lighting as a separate pass, then rendered out a fire and smoke. I brought these into After effects and comped them together as well as making some colour corrections and adding some glows.

For the embers I used the velocity channel data from fumefx and piped that into Particle flow, rendered out the particles with motion blur to get the desired effect.

Overall I was happy with my result, there were a few things I could definitely improve on which I can take into my next fumefx project.

Thanks