Fire in a Flash

As the goal of the game is the creation of fire, it makes sense to look at some of the ways to create animated fire. For this episode, I went with the easiest way, which is to simply film a real fire and use the video. The fire movie I used is a four frame sequence. While the images could be used in their photographic format, in order to make the flames fit in with the more cartoon like feel, the images were color reduced and converted into vectors.

A variation of this method is the layers of flames method. Instead of a single flame animation, multiple animations are used. If each flame animation is a separate movie clip, more random-looking flames can be achieved by having the movies have a different number of frames.

The holy grail of creating fire is to generate the flames algorithmically. The best way of doing this is to use a technique known as particle systems. The first part of a particle effect is the emitter. This may or may not be visible (depends on the effect). It’s job is quite simply to create particles. How many particles that are created every cycle and for how many cycles help control the effect. For fire we would probably want to use multiple emitters which would form the area that the flame was coming from. The emitters would either be invisible or disguised as the fuel for the fire. The emitter would spew particles at a randomly varying rate.

Particles are the visible parts of the particle effect. Particles have a life, and based on properties (such as speed and orientation) they start with live out their life. The life may vary based on the type of particle, but for the fire the effect we are after is to simply to move away from the emitter with a slightly random path and fade until there is nothing left.