1. Animating Fire by Kathleen Marty

2. How to create fire? Implement the paper: Structural Modeling of Flames for a Production Environment, by Arnauld Lamorlette and Nick Foster. Emphasis: Total artistic and behavioral control. Basis: Physics and stochastic models. No intention to perfectly model real world.

3. Motivation Why not use a numerical simulation to model fire? –Numerical simulations scale poorly. Increase in resolution = O(n 3 ) increase in complexity. –Fire is chaotic. Initial conditions cause drastic effects. –Unintuitive to control under different physical circumstances.

4. Essential Model: 8 stages (1) Flame Spine(2) Wind Field(3) Flicker / Separate(4) Profile (5) Noise(6) Transform(7) Render(8) Procedural Controls

5. What I did: Flame spine Step 1: Created a B-spline that can interpolate through points that move in a wind field. Step 2: Windfield: modeled thermal bouyancy and diffusion. Did not model rotational wind. Solved using rk4. Step 3: Modeled flame flickering. Flickers when reaches a certain height. Did not model flame separation.

6. What I did: Flame profile Step 4: Obtained flame profile by thresholding a flame image and reading the boundary. Rotated the profile about the center and randomly sampled the volume to create particles. Step 5: Adding noise to the volumetric samples made it look bad. Paper uses “Flow Noise” [Perlin].

7. What I did: Profile Transformation Step 6: Transformed the flame from the profile space to corresponding points on the flame spine. Quaternoins worked perfectly for this step, I learned the hard way. (Rotation about an arbitrary axis).

8. What I did: Rendering Step 7: Rendered the flame only by mapping colors from original image to particles. Did not: –Apply density function to determine incandescence. –Super-sample profile based on camera position (flames are view-dependent). –Do Step 8: flame spread, object interaction, smoke generation.

9. Some Results

11. Getting into Maya Plugin: Got particles in but lost color mapping.

12. Given more time: