Material for Smoke, Fire, Water

The critical thing is, face map is selected and there is no specularity/glossiness.

Self illumination is optional.

Additive Transparency under extended parameters is for fire.

Diffuse slot -- radial gradient, fractal, note the noise settings ... size will vary according to your needs ... make sure all but the color are exactly the same for the opacity slot. We are going for fire here; your colors would change for smoke or water.

Opacity slot is a radial gradient with the noise inside a mask of a radial gradient without noise. The purpose of this is to mask out any edges of the noise.

Make the noise gradient first, then click standard and select mask ... keep existing material as sub-map ...

This is the noise gradient

This is the radial mask for the noise gradient



This shows how the noise radial is masked by the no-noise radial.

Note -- noise settings for maps can also be animated if necessary.