fire body

[Justin Productions]

The plug-in you’re looking for is DigiEffects Delirium (quite expensive thought).

Search “Human Torch” in the COW Archives/Google.

Good luck.

Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Professional

[Nicholas Toth]

They put a lot of work into that. Check out the composites at the website.

http://www.giantkillerrobots.com

Particular may enable you to get some good results, but also try fluid simulators — ie MR MERCURY — and just flip it to a vertical flow — water and fire are very similar with how they marry particles to each other — one is just more turbulent than the other.

[Darby Edelen]

I would use a Fractal Noise effect to get your fire, if you want it to look particularly flamey here are some good settings:

Fractal Type : Dynamic Twist
Noise Type : Soft Linear

Contrast : 160
Brightness : -20

Transform – (disable Uniform Scaling)
Scale Width : 100
Scale Height : 300

Offset Turbulence: Animate from a high Y value (480) to a low Y value (-480), this makes the flames look like they are rising.

Evolution: Animate over time (I used 2 rotations over 2 seconds).

You’ll note that you end up with a black and white image that looks vaguely firey. Duplicate this layer, set the bottom one to use the top one as a Luma Track Matte and then apply CC Toner to the bottom one (pick fiery colors, bright yellow for highlights, orange for midrange and dark red for shadows).

Pre-comp these 2 layers and name them something like Flames, then place this layer over your source footage and change its blending mode to Add. If you can, try to matte your actor out of the scene (if it’s green screened and you can key it that’s ideal), otherwise you’ll have use animated masks with a decent feather in order to keep your flames on your actor.

You can also play with the Fractal Noise effect in a similar manner to create some glowing embers if you like.

Depending on your required level of authenticity you might want to track your actor through the scene, apply this information to a Null object and parent the Flames layer to it.

An obvious shortcoming of this technique is that the fire will not bend realistically due to air resistance as it moves around in a scene (it will always look like a static fire on a windless day). I’m open to any creative solutions for that one (;

[David Bogie]

Or try Colorama instead of toner if you need more color range and transparency.
Whatever you do, you will want to have at least two fire layers, maybe more, with different parameters, to give your effect some organic chaos.

CC Particle System and PS Classic can fill an alpha or use an alpha as the emitter source, This could you give you a controllable rim of incandescence, that extra sizzle that helps distinguish your human torch effect from everyone else’s clich

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

This really requires particle Effects.

If you film the actor on a green screen or create an alpha matte through keying, wondertouch particleIllusion can use the alpha channel as the source for particles – in other words, the shape of your actor can be what genrates the particles.

—————————————-
Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com

—————————————-
Click the link below to subscribe to the Creative Cow After Effects Podcast, and get free AE video tutorials:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=111087911

[David Bogie]

I disagree. Incandescent effects like fire are all about illusion. You only need to make weird, chaotic swirly stuff that an audience thinks resembles fire; The audience will allow themselves to be convinced especially if the physics are right. In fact, I’d say the physics are the most important part: Does the fire system, whatever you’re using, flow into a low pressure area an an object moves?

But you don’t really need particles to make fire at all.

https://www.theanvel.com/free_aeps_detail.php?aeps=84

Dean uses text animation presets, vector blur, roughen edges and some other simple and fast effects to create excellent combustion illusions. These are much easier to cope with than particle systems. Interactivity with the environment is controllable but it’s certainly not as easy as a particle system, that is true.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

I agree. As long as it looks good, then it doesn’t matter how it’s achieved. But those effect that you point to, while nice for a logo treatment and which look good over black, would not stand up in a real world setting over footage. It’s clearly fractal based, and not fire. The feeling of fire is there, but it in no way looks like real fire.

Look, maybe it’s because I’ve been doing this too long, but I am never forgiving about things like fire or water. Since we see these elements in our every day life, it’s very hard to see a fake looking fire or water effect as anything other than fake.

The very truth of it is, to create realistic fire or water effects, you need to have a source that is based in reality.

In Lord of the Rings, for example, much of the water that floods eisenguard were sprite-based particles (Flat planes) that used rotoscoped video of water splashes. I’ve seen the same done for fire.

THose are the fire effects that look truly real.

—————————————-
Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com

—————————————-
Click the link below to subscribe to the Creative Cow After Effects Podcast, and get free AE video tutorials:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=111087911

[Punstc]

so basicly everyone is saying i should use something like a particle system to cover my body to look like fire. in looking at a few fantastic 4 picture of the human flame he is pretty much engulfed in an orange fire like texture and a few flames that ripple off that. I was hoping to work with masks and rotoscoping because i feel more comfortable with in that dealing with many of lightsaber and star wars. moving onto a totally new perspective on how to pull off this effect. what techniques would be best way to turn body into that orange firey color and then add the ambince and noise to go along with it. would that still involve particle systems?

Jake

[Darby Edelen]

Fractal noise should work fine for the orange flaming glowy body look. It’s not the ideal solution obviously, I’m sure that in Fantastic Four they used footage of a lava flow, glowing embers or some other real world firey glow and used this as a base to texture a 3D model of their actor. Fractal noise will look comparatively flat, which can be assuaged somewhat by creative use of blending modes, but it’s an AE only solution if you’re short on lava at the moment.

Particles will work better for any flame emitting from the body. I think a combined approach to build an animated glowy base (Fractal Noise) and more a dynamic shroud of flames (Particle Effects) should work well.

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

now that sounds like a plan.

Check out my tutorial on effecting fractals which may help in generating a fire texture for the body.

—————————————-
Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com

—————————————-
Click the link below to subscribe to the Creative Cow After Effects Podcast, and get free AE video tutorials:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=111087911