hi guys
Any pro tips for fire effects? I've tried different approaches and none seem to be quite right, but there must be a good approach (and coupled with excellent execution) as some games (darksiders, resident evil 5 ex) have great fire effects.

Anyone's pro or otherwise experience in making great fire is greatly appreciated
cheers

Are you looking to capture fire effects to animated planes, or use particle fx or a mix of the two? What apps plug-ins and engine are you planning on using?

If you're using 3dsmax, I think FumeFX is a must. However making it real time ready isn't all that easy.

You Tube

You Tube

yeah, real time. I'm using UDK, personally. I've tried Fume FX, it's real nice but I can't see how to use it's stuff in real time applications. Flipbooks/sampled loops of fire I tried aren't great, (too noticeable) on animated planes.

Ideally I'm open to any suggestions, tips, anything anyone has found useful for particle based real-time fx. or anything fire related in a game situation.
cheers

depends completely on the type of fire...

i made some quite nice torch effects using a simple teardrop mesh shape that always pointed upwards it had two layers of polys with scrolling uvS and alpha verts at the top, also a vert wiggling shader...worked nicely when combined with a few particles to break up the polies...

also tried some larger versions for bigger fires, but its not very dynamic so it depends on the use

In UDK I just made multiple grey-scale sprites of different stages of fire, broke down the emitter into multiple stages of the effect to make the plume. Used Cascade to control the color of the sprites over age. Size and opacity controlled over distance/age. It's a multi-layered effect. You can get it looking pretty good with one sprite sheet. Just need good planing.

The latest fire I created had a teardrop shaped mesh with a vertex shader that had noise panning up to offset the verts in a kind of wavy pattern. Then there was a fire texture panning up as well. Those meshes scaled up at the start of their life then down at the end, but also stretched vertically over their life. Looked pretty convincing. this was in UE3