The purpose of this project was to write a surface shader that when used in conjunction with the previously written (water) displacement shader would give a simple object the appearance of being an animated flame. As with the previous assignments, the emphasise was on the vital need to carefully observe and document a natural phenomena before creating a digital version of it.
This reference photographs are taken with high shutter speeds to capture the form of the flame as accurate as possible. Also, I had to manually increase the F value to the highest value in order to get the right values and colors of the flame.
The image sequence above shows how I created the basic flame shape and pattern.
1. noise is remapped using smoothstep function and t value.
blur variable is used to control sharpness of the edge while incandescence controls brightness.
2. Blur is increased
3. The image is inverted
4. Inverted image is multiplied with the first image.
5. The color gradient is applied.
6. Another noise is introduced to the noise function.
7. Gradient ramp is added to the result.