Effector count has been unclamped, you can use as many as you like, just note that it takes more horsepower when you begin to include higher effector counts. I have only tested up to three and sim times where still good. This is also completely dependent upon what you want channels you want to effect.
For example effecting turbulence will bring your simulation times up significantly as compared to changing the fluids color.
Can you use effectors to shade the color of fire based on temperature? That’s the closest approximation of black body radiation I can think of.
Hi all,
I’m currently struggling with FumeFX to try to imitate the fire-look of the image attached (the image is from a preview from a stock-site). It’s a very stylized fire with smooth tendrils. Does anybody know if this is at all possible with FumeFX?
Since I only get the more gaseous/plasma look. Which is normal I guess since it is all about fluid dynamics.
Any tips are greatly appreciated!!
David
Yes - you can make temperature the input of a gradient and color - the output. And you can stack this with other effectors too!
Getting this is mostly play with the shader - you’ll need a sharp cutoff on both the left and right sides, from my experience.
RayCat, I made some fire that is somewhat visually similar I think. With some minor tweaking of the shader, I think you could get that look. Here is my Fume render with some color correction in After Effects.
If you give me until later today, I can post my scene file somewhere and you can take a look at my settings. I do the color in After Effects using the Colorama effect set to “Fire” preset and then tweak the colors from there.
Daniel,
that would be great! The amount of parameters of FumeFX can be sometimes daunting, so it would be very handy to get a starting point. Thank you in advance!
A good tip to use AE for the color correction. I’m using FumeFX to create high res fire images but AE can help in the color correction anyway.
Now, if only those sims wouldn’t take so long 
(rendering at 6400x4800 requires some hefty sims).
David
Indeed it can be, but actually Fume is rather user friendly, especially compared to the likes of Maya Fluids or Phoenix FD.
The trick with getting good looking fluid sims is understanding how the phenomena work in real life. Then you must try to get that level of chaos into the sim. Computers don’t want to be chaotic. They are linear and non-chaotic by nature. That’s why fluid sims often times don’t look real. People don’t add in the necessary variances in temperature, fuel, emission, etc to break up the linear-ness of the sim.
They try to do this with turbulence, but often times it just ends up looking like a readable noise field, and that’s just as bad. I try not to introduce generic turbulence into my sim, except for a small amount to just break up the edges slightly. I never try to use turbulence to actually drive the fluid.
Daniel,
yes indeed, the border between realism and the uncanny valley is a small one.
FYI, the effect I asked earlier about is coming up well. Remember it’s stylized fire, so the realism is a bit over the top… for once that is intentional
Does anybody know how to get rid of the hard edges inside the flames, I like to call them plasma lines.
I understand they are part of the fluid sim. I can not get them masked with the Color gradient. I’m trying to soften them with WT but that introduces other lines… Anybody any ideas?
There is no vorticity, almost no advection and a little bit of noise to get the swirls in the flames, but those affect the entire flame (also the inside). It would be cool if there was a flame shape editor which determines the flame shape if no other forces influence the flame tendril…
FYI I’m still having fun with fumefx, fluid sims are a real challenge 
That is money good spent!
Hi, if thats ok i would like to refresh my question.
I managed to get interesting particle motion with pflow and fume, but my particles die without a reason and dont continue on their smoke path, when i set fumefx follow velocity multiplier in pflow at 3.0 they go at longer distance along my smoke path, but are faster than the smoke. I have done many tests with spawn and they looked very nice but the particles loose velocity and die quickly.
This has nothing to do with delete operator
particles are not leaving the grid (the image might suggest that but its a bad angle)
Its just like they loose velocity, they do not follow the smoke trail till the end, they follow at the start and lose velocity.
I need them to have the smoke motion with a lottle vorticity and follow a path.
I will not bump this again, if no one has any ideas how to achieve such effect, then i guess i will have to try something else.
I was reading through the Magnus Wrenninge section of the pdf Daniel-B posted and got to thinking that if FumeFX were to have the option of bypassing the rendering tab and fusionworks renderer all together and we were able to assign a shader such as the VRayGLSLMtl it would be possible to write our own black body shader or any other shader for that matter.
The GLSL should also open up the possibility of using the GPU for volumetric rendering.
(Direct particle rendering too but I digress.)
Vlado, meet Kreso… Kreso, meet Vlado… 
If only it’d be that “easy”…
Many collaborative features for many plugins were left behind because of “conflict of interest”…ChaosGroup has Phoenix…
I know, I know… :sad:
And Sitni Sati already collaborates with Cebas but really…
Can’t we all just get along?
Seriously though, things like this hold back technological advancement and hinder artists more than it helps them.
Besides, Phoenix doesn’t even have the ability to implement this kind of thing with GLSL.
I’d like to see more developers with the attitude that Imageworks has with it’s open source projects.
They don’t have to collaborate per se…
Just open it up, let us do the work.
My latest personal work, i went for this large scale smoke plume kind of look, which can work for a volcano or a huge blast. I wanted to get this rolling, rising smoke effect.
Fumefx, rendered with Default scanline.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y-4hLopOug&list=UU0DLT93rckpr6-UAJYR4-Fw&index=1&feature=plcp
How is this not in here already!?
FumeFX 3 is out:
http://afterworks.com/FumeFX/Overview.asp
Woehoe, looking forward to see if it is also faster than the current version.
Btw also nice new features
Yes and for Maya will be released also).
I think Xsi version not far of(it may depend on when Phoenix FD put their plugin to Xsi) . So now who have pipeline in Maya and working with max only because of fumefx, can now get rid off it.