Fire particle creation, step by step and outcome.
I'm excited about this because when I set out to create this character, these effects were always a stretch goal, only to be completed if I have enough time and my technology allows it, and luckily it does!
Below is the step by step of how I created the fire for the characters orbs and the spell between his hands.
1. Before anything else, back when the character was in Substance Painter, I made sure to paint the orbs around his head with an opacity mask to make the top half of them translucent, to help sell the idea that they were made of green fire further down the line.
2. The next step I believe is up to personal preference to the artist, but I prefer to make the alpha map first, with less colours to confuse me I can work purely on what silhouettes I want for the fire/magic that I'm trying to make. So below is the alpha map for the textures, with small particles in the centre and the top left being a brighter glow that will go in the centre of the orbs.
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| Alpha texture |
3. Next is taking that alpha map photoshop document and making a diffuse texture and emmissive texture from that same document so that they all align. Here you can see I added a bright yellow/orange to break up the green of the fire and make it look more realistic. Below that is also the emissive map with the black background.
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| Diffuse texture |
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| Emissive texture |
4. Lastly its time to make planes in 3Ds Max and lay these planes over the textures so that they can be placed around the character within the space.
5. After this is done, I have the 9 particle textures on planes and ready to go, and name them accordingly A - I so that they can be cloned and put around the character and I can still track which alpha is where. I apply bend modifiers to the planes in both the X and Y axis to curve them and trick the eye into thinking there is thickness to them when the character is rotated around.
6. This is the cleanup phase, I then take the character into marmoset and see how it looks in the preview, as I can only see so clearly in 3Ds. Below you can see the iterations I went through to get to the the final product. The first has no emissive map and there is one plane that cuts off at the top that I removed. The second has a strange sharpness to the front texture now that the emissive has been added, so I fixed that as well, and the last one is the final outcome!
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| Texture on the edges of the orb cuts off/looks repetitive and needs to be removed |
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| Front texture looks strange and high contrast, needs to be fixed |
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| Final orb models |
7. The same process is needed for the spell between his hands then we're all done!
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