In search of the Holy Grail of visual effects that is simulated fire and smoke an area of VFX that I have always been interested in but also one of the hardest things after liquids and water to pull off digitally.
Using Fume FX seems so flaky and it's easy to mis-judge your settings, the difference between 0.1 and 0.2 can be disasterous on some variables (of which there are many) and the long simulation and render times can be quite off putting.
Enter into the firey, smokey arena the powerful and for me at least easier to use Phoenix Fluid Dynamics 2 this I find is a whole lot more accessable to get to grips with and its quite quick to calculate your simulations and you can play around with the variables on the fly and see how it changes things.
The tricky part tho is getting your render and transparency settings right to display your firey wonders but once you get there they can easily be saved for future use, a good starting point is to load in one of the included sample files then save off the render settings and tweak it to suit your own sim.
I recently was going thru some settings so I made a logo for a Youtube friend and as a personal test I wanted so see how quick I could set his logo on fire...haha.
You can see the intro logo burning away on quite a few of his video's now..glad he liked it.
Click to see the Burning Intro
