Hello,
Doing some work recently on flamethrower effect for a client. This is progress made over the course of two days. I completely changed my approach in the latter half of the second day and I think the results were improved considerably. This is what I have now and I am quite pleased with it, but I think the effect would benefit from some feedback if there are any kind-hearted fx artists out there willing to give me some advice.
Not much of an artist, but I think I can help you a bit.
What screen alignment are you using? It looks strange in your last image.
Your colors look a bit off, the fire looks too red at the end. Fire colors are easy with a BlackBody node. Use a Color Over Life or Dynamic module to set a temperature, and feed Particle Color or Dynamic Parameter into a BlackBody node in your material, multiply with a monochrome flame texture and feed into emissive.
I made this modifying the blackbody particle system in Content Examples/Effects. The initial particle is like a liquid, it carries momentum, falls due to gravity, and doesn’t grow or spread much. Dying spawns a more flame-like particle with Event Generator and Event Receiver modules. It inherits velocity but has high drag. It grows, spreads and cools rapidly, and accelerates upward. A collision event spawns a similar particle that starts hotter, grows, spreads and rises faster.
Thanks for the feedback, that effect looks great and the ideas behind how it works seem really sensible and interesting.
I’m not using screen alignment at all, it’s a static-mesh emitter, which emits a deformed sphere which increases in scale over life. The smaller sphere looks more jagged as the scale of the deformation remains the same.
I am currently using the Blackbody node in the way you described, I think that perhaps because I recorded the effect on a black background the smoke got lost a bit.
Currently I have my particles set with a constant acceleration in the negative z-axis, to emulate the liquid effect you describe, and I have an acceleration over life module which gradually increases until it overpowers the constant negative acceleration until it rises as smoke. The ideas of spawning a particle on death and collision are really insightful.
Thanks for sharing! 