Creating Realistic Fire Using Particles in 3ds Max
Categories: Effects, Featured, Particles
Written By: Chris
This tutorial will walk you thru creating realistic fire using 3ds Max’s particle system. With the right particle generation, texture, and material, you can produce some fairly realistic effects. If you have not done so, first create your fire material by following the material tutorial, because you will later apply this material to your particles.
Step 1 Setting up Particles
Start by creating a blizzard particle system and place it in your scene so its pointing upwards. To do this go to Create > Particles > Blizzard. Rotate the particle emitter 180 degrees so its pointing up. Under the modify panel, change the emitter size to 45 x 45.
The viewport display show how the particles will be represented in the viewport, not how the particles will be rendered. The percentage of particles displays a certain percentage in the viewport but the amount of particles rendered will always be 100%.
Step 2 Particle Generation
Under Particle Generation choose a user rate of 3. This controls how many particles are to be created per frame. Under Particle Motion choose a speed of 1.97, a variation of .276, tumble 0 and tumble rate 0. Under Particle Timing make your Emit start a negative number. You can make that negative number the amount of frames you have so that the particle generation is constant throughout the clip. My frame count is 250 so I chose an Emit Start of -250, Emit Stop and Display Until of 250. Chose 36 for Life and 34 for Variation. Under Particle Size choose 2.24, Variation 2.39, Grow For 5 and Fade For 29.
Speed of the particles determines how fast the particles are moving. Variation allows for various particles to travel at different speeds. Emit start determines when you wish to start generating particle, Emit Stop determines when you wish to stop generating particles and Display until determines which frame you wish to no longer display particles. Life determines how many frames the particle will live for. One particle will last for 36 frames in this case.
Step 3 Instanced Geometry
Under Particle Type choose Instanced Geometry. This allows the particle to be any mesh or geometry created in the scene. We are going to create a custom particle. Create in your scene a Sphere of a radius of 3.625 and 32 Segments. Now add a noise modifier to the sphere. Under the noise Parameters, choose Seed 0, Scale 4.777, Roughness 0, Iterations 4.48. Under Strength make X: -2.87, Y: 5.59, Z: 12.182. We now have a custom particle that looks pretty crazy. Go back to the particle emitter parameters. Under particle type, you should have Instanced Geometry selected. Scroll down until you see a button that says Pick Object. Click on that button and choose the sphere you just created. Right click on the sphere and choose hide selected. You no longer need to mess with the sphere. Now the particle emitter should emitting many little spheres. To see this change your viewport display from dots to mesh. (be careful as this could crash your computer) Once you have had your fill, switch back to dots to save memory.
Step 4 Adding Materials
If you have not done so yet, create your material following this tutorial.
Hit M and add your material to the particle emitter by either dragging it to your emitter or hitting the assign to selection button. This will add the fire material you created to your particle system. Do a test render, you should have something that looks pretty close to fire. Under the Material ID Channel, change the ID from 0 to 1.
Step 5 Video Post
To add the final touch were going to use 3ds Max’s Video Post. Under Render choose Video Post. Click on the add scene event button. Choose Camera. If you don’t have a camera then just choose perspective. Make sure that the VP start time and VP end time match the length of your main timeline. In this case the VP start time is 0 and the VP end time is 250. Hit ok. Make sure you don’t have anything in your queue highlighted. Next click on the add image filter event button. Choose lens effect glow and hit ok. Again, make sure you have nothing in the queue highlighted. Last choose the image output event button. Click on file and choose a path to save your file. Also choose an output type. I usually use .mov for QuickTime movies.
Double click on Lens Effects Glow and click on Setup. Click the VP Preview button. This gives a general idea of what the glow will look like. Click the VP Queue button to see a preview of your scene. Under Properties check the effects ID checkbox. Make sure you have effects ID 1. Under the preferences tab change the Effect size to 7. Make sure the Color type is pixel and bring the intensity down to 1. You can play around with these preferences to get various desired effects. Under the inferno tab you can also tweak some of the Gaseous, Fiery or Electric settings for other various desired effects.
When you are ready to render out your movie, click the Execute Sequence button under the video post options. Choose your output size and time range and hit render. You may have to play around with the settings, but the general idea is to mimic movement, opacity and the brightness of fire using a combination of custom particle and post effects.
March 6th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
good.
March 13th, 2008 at 9:59 am
very good, love the effect, by the way on the quicktime player, maybe it’s because its on a black background but I have several thin horizontal lines extending from the right and it kind of ruins the effect (plays along with the edge) is this normal? Any advice be appreciated thanks.
March 24th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Its hard to solve the problem without seeing the final result. DO you have this online anywhere? Try adding variation to the particle generation, life, or particle speed. Those lines may be appearing due to too much symmetry. It also might be the compression you are using with quicktime. Try animation compression on best settings.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Thanks so muche it works amazing.
I had to do work for my college and you saved me.
Greetings from Jerusalem
Asaf
April 17th, 2008 at 9:58 am
really nice .. .
April 17th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
You saved my life!!! Thank You!
April 20th, 2008 at 9:45 am
fire was really good.but there should be smoke coming out of it.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:13 am
Hi Chris,
You have posted nice tutorial. Keep up the good work.
Cheers,
Srinivas
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 am
mooo I R SMART
May 4th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Hey, AWESOME tutorial. I’m gonna try this out now, but i THINK all I have to do is group two emitters to the back of my jet and it will appear like it is emitting smoke. What about the sphere? Can I leave it where it is?? Email me cause I won’t be checking this page too often.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Can anyone help me? I do all the steps but I don’t see any particles after following the steps. I had this similar problem with other tutorials. How do I see the particles? Please help, I am new to 3DS Max…
May 7th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Can you not see them in your viewport or is it only when you render? If its just in your viewport try changing the particle display to mesh. You also may need to change teh life of the particle, as the default life is 30 frames, you may not be able to see them for very long. Let me know if any of these work.
May 10th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
how do you make the fire last longer?? i need the fire to stay the same size but last 600 frames?
May 11th, 2008 at 1:40 am
Andreyes,
Try changing the over life of the particles, and the emit end time to 600, if you do that you also need to adjust the length of the video post to 600 frames. Hope that helps.
May 11th, 2008 at 2:36 am
Never seen before& I didn’t have this tipe of tutorial! Will u help me to have different tipe of tutorial bcoz I am from very poor family so I couldn’t get more training from any institute. My english is very bad so don’t mind.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
hmmm… when i render the video out it plays (really) fast, is this how fast it’s gonna look if i add it on to other stuff or can i slow the fire down like the one you have in that video?
—-GREAT TUTORIAL!!!
-fast
-easy
-GREAT FOR BEGINNIERS(like me)
and although there arn’t pictures to guild you, his (I would suppose the writer of this is a guy) directions are good enough to not need pictures!!!
June 15th, 2008 at 7:24 am
What the hell my results look really strange
The fire looks like a spiral sling that contains the material, and where do i switch that material ID?
Thanks
June 15th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
The material ID for each material can be found in the material browser, you will see a little box with a 0. Click and hold to see options 0 - 14 for material IDs… Im not sure why the fire looks like a spiral sling, my guess is the particle count may be too high. Good Luck.
Chris
June 26th, 2008 at 8:43 am
yaar if i have a problem,if i use under particle generation>particle quantity> user rate to 3 or any number less than 10. i can not see particle. and if a change that use rate to 10 or greater than 10 then i an able to see the particle…
what is it i dont know
plz help me out
June 30th, 2008 at 3:34 am
ceat a fire effect in 3d max 9
July 10th, 2008 at 4:26 am
Hi, this tutorial is awesome. But why I can’t get anything out of the video post. When I preview it in the lens flare thing it only shows black screen. When I execute the queue it does nothing. Result is black screen. The particle system is working. When I render thru the typical renderer it renders the particle system flowing perfectly. Only the video post thing is not working…
July 10th, 2008 at 4:41 am
I solved the problem. The reason was the image output event. When I just removed it then everything started working properly.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:46 am
hmmm But now I realized that when i don’t have the output event I can’t get the video file anywhere… But when I put it there it doesn’t render anything. INTERESTING…
August 11th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
AWESOME!!!! THANKS!!
August 21st, 2008 at 7:09 am
its nice i really wanted to learn about particles thanks for providing your teachings through this website please provide more tutorials on particles
August 30th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
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August 30th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
fund objective to gnerate superir
August 31st, 2008 at 9:45 am
I have a problem… my fire looks very strange i think because it is highlighted, i guess the problem is from the queue in Video Post. how do i remove the highlights?
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Wow dude this is cool but yet im not as satisfied as i was hoping to be but it was fun ^_^ thanks Truly!!!!
September 25th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
I don’t think particle age works with instance geometry. My result turned out like yours, but it doesn’t seem to matter if I alter the particle age colors.
Still, excellent tutorial, I learned alot ^^
September 28th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Awsome tutorial
could u pls mail me some more tutorial on video post…
thanks
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
@hiten,
I am planning on a doing an overview of video post and cover all the basics.
October 20th, 2008 at 5:12 am
I’m an absolute beginner, so sorry if the question sounds stupid…
I’ve followed different fire tutorials and there is no fire if I render it.
Even the most simple create atmospheric apparatus/rendering/enviroment
add fire effect doesn’t work.
Please help me!
October 20th, 2008 at 6:37 am
@ccjumana
A couple things to check
1. Make sure your particle size is big enough to see when rendered
2. Try using a camera
If those don’t work, email [ chrishusein@gmail.com ] me one of your max files so I can take a look at it.
October 30th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Good Tutorial, very helpful. Thank you. XD
December 9th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Is there any way to make the particles move slower? I already put the speed
to 0 but it’s still moving too fast, it doesn’t look real. I don’t want to make my
fire any bigger so is there any other way?
Great tutorial though
December 9th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Try turning down the gravity space warp modifier, thats whats causing it to speed up or slow down.
December 9th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Whoa, the effect is really awesome! Tweaking around the settings yields many different fire looks, and this same method can be applied to so many other stuffs. This tutorial rocks! Thank you very much
February 11th, 2009 at 2:02 am
Hi,
I follow this tutorial.
Nice, It’s work fine.
Thank you,
Doller
February 15th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
nice tutorial man good work good job
February 19th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Hi this is fantastic it looks amazing but i made the fire and it looks good but i can’t get the fire to flow. I do the video post and i hit the execute sequence button and then it goes through all of the frames but what do i do from there to get the fire to actually flow, in the perspective view?
March 25th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
the output is verry different ……it looks sad 4 me…may be i shud retry
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:36 am
After reading through the article, I feel that I need more information on the topic. Could you suggest some resources please?
June 11th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Oh yea, thats pretty cool.