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How to make a burning laser with fire and smoke
How to make a burning laser with fire and smoke
Gabriel Gumucio, updated 2013-01-30 04:18:52 UTC 123,747 views  Rating:
(7 ratings)
Page 3 of 3

Laser Impact Glow

Now, let's make the glowing of the laser impacting the plate. 

  • Take LaserImpactGlow, move it to the center of the MotionPathLocator and parent it to the same.
  • In the object's shader, key Transparency, Incandescence to switch on and off, at the frames where the Locator starts and stops. As before, make it fade in and fade out in 10 frames at both ends.
If you render the sequence now, you'll see we have a laser beam, a glowing trail, falling sparks and an impact glow where the laser is hitting.
The only thing missing now is fire and smoke, which we will add with more fluid effects. So, let's do that.

Fire and Smoke

  • Choose Fluid Effects>Create a 3D container with Emitter
  • Rename the fluid1 to FireSmoke

Set the following settings:
Base Resolution: 60
Boundary X and Z: None, Boundary Y: -Y Side
Density, Velocity and Temperature: Dynamic Grid
High Detail Solve: All Grids
Substeps: 1 (Turn this up to 2 before making final nCache)
Solver Quality: 20 (Turn this up to 40 before making final nCache)
Auto Resize: On (A great feature which makes the container follow the fluid)
Auto Resize Threshold: 0.01

Under Contents Details:


Density:
Density Scale: 1
Buyoancy: 50
Dissipation: 1.6 The rest should be 0

Velocity:
Velocity Scale: 1 on all
Swirl: 0.6,
Noise: 0

Turbulence:
Strength: 0.1,
Frequency: 0.2,
Speed: 0.2 

Temperature:
Temperature Scale: 4
Buyoancy: 50
Dissipation: 6
Diffusion: 0.4
Turbulence: 0.1 The rest should be 0

Under Shading:
Transparency: V: 0.25
Dropoff Shape: Off (Important if your emitter is going to move around a lot)

For Color, we will assign the same Projection that is lighting the Plate. In this way, the smoke will become black as it flows outside the illuminated ellipse.
  • Go to Hypershade and locate EllipseProjection. 
  • Without further ado, drag this node to FireSmoke's ”Selected Color” attribute under Color in the Attribute Editor with the MMB.

Just a little more to go in this node:

  • Under Incandescence, set the following Colors and Positions:
H: 39, S: 0.5, V: 2.5, Position 1
H: 39, S: 0.85, V: 2.5, Position 0.96
H: 13, S: 1, V: 0,9, Position 0.8
Black, Position 0
Incandescense Input: Temperature

  • Under Lighting, set Directional Light to 0, 0, 46. This is the position of the directional light in the scene and will give us a shadow of the smoke on the Plate. Real Lights should be Off.

With all that set, switch over to the emitter tab since we have some settings to do here too:

  • First of all, rename it to FireSmokeEmitter
  • Do the now customary keyframing of the Rate, just as we have done with the other ”Rates”, with the values 0 and 100, respectively. Otherwise, the fire and smoke will appear even if the laser is not active, and that would be uncool.
  • Under Fluid Attributes, set Density/Voxel/Sec to 15 and Heat/Voxel/Sec to 30. You should tweak these numbers according to your liking. Fluid Dropoff should be 2.
  • Also in that section, enable Motion Streak.
  • Set Max Distance to 1, or something similar.

Finally, parent the emitter to the MotionPathLocator.

That's it! Remember to tweak the settings!

Before rendering your sequence, it is a good idea to create a Fluid nCache for the two fluids. Also, I recommend using mental ray, the smoke looks a bit better with it.

Here's a different (newer) version of the rendered scene.