Creating and Tracking Fire

[Greg Burrus]

I wouldn’t be able to say for sure since I’ve never done fire before but looking at the comments it looks like they used the particle system inside cinema 4d. I’m thinking the used a 3d point tracker for the shots. Then took the points around the actors to emit the fire particles.

There’s an example fire that come with cinema 4d using pyroCluster. Doesn’t look the same as the video but could be a starting point.

One of the people invloved in it is Luxx, Tim Clapham, who has bunch of stuff on his site to learn particles https://www.helloluxx.com/ There may be something there to figure it out.

Hope that helps and if you figure it I’d be interested in knowing as well.

[Randy Johnson]

rotoscope the video, track the the camera, animate a “body” to move similar to the video, animate and export stuff to compositing and… and make it look good.

Here is a breakdown of a similar process,

https://www.justinbates.com/breakdown.html

/Randy

[Adam Trachtenberg]

That would be my guess too. Once you’ve tracked enough points you could create basic geometry and attach it to the tracking nulls with Xpresso and use the geometry as an emitter. There are a couple of plugins that can create pretty realistic fire from particles, e.g. DPIT Effex and Turbulence4D.

[Nick Falangas]

Hey guys thanks for your recommendations. I purchased Cinema 4D and have been doing tutorials with GrayScaleGorilla but I am just curious with companies like https://www.ringoffire.com/ are they using custome software or is this all achievable using Cinema 4D mixed with Green Screening.. particles.. etc.. Please give a direction so that I can learn. Maybe there is some school I could really pick up some great advice and training because as of now I am just re inventing the wheel here. Thanks guys for your leads and advice 🙂

[Shawn Miller]

To answer your OP, that fire was made with Turbulence 4D.

https://www.jawset.com/gallery_tfd.php

To answer your last post…

“I am just curious with companies like https://www.ringoffire.com/ are they using custome software or is this all achievable using Cinema 4D”

Yes and yes… high end shops use custom software along with off the shelf software to create those amazing shots. The good news is that you can achieve silimar results with any of the off the shelf packages (like C4D, Modo, Maya etc. (plus plugins)), however there is a catch… it’s a lot harder to do by yourself, and it takes a fair amount of time to even understand how much you need to know, in order to pull off the shots you want to create (if that makes sense).

“Maybe there is some school I could really pick up some great advice and training”

This is where the fun begins. Here is a list of some of the resources I’ve found valuable over the years – I hope others will chime in and share more:

https://www.fxphd.com/
https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/
https://www.cmivfx.com/
https://cineversity.com/
https://videocopilot.net/
https://www.digitaltutors.com/11/index.php
https://www.lynda.com/Member.aspx
https://www.vfxtalk.com/
https://www.totaltraining.com

Thanks,

Shawn

[Nate Vander plas]

Great list of resources, but does anyone know of tutorials specifically for Turbulence FD? I’ve played with it but haven’t figured much out on my own.