Fiery blast

We are making a fiery emission here. This is based on a fiery blast from a dragon in a Max sample file. It could be used for an inferno if the spread of the super spray was widened and the speed was slowed down a little.

Setup

The super spray is set up to the facing particles to be moving either towards or away from the camera.

Top and front views:

Light

There is an very bright omni light colored red near the super spray to illuminate the fire.

 

The multiplier of this light will be animated from 0 to 16 and back down as the inferno increases then dies back

Environment is critical for everything. This shows the explosion in a blue gradient sphere with flipped normals; the blue is completely overwhelmed by the red light.

Material

As is standard for this kind of thing we have facing with no specular. self illumination here is 100%.

As is also standard, we have a diffuse and opacity map. What is a little unusual is we are using turbulence. As a result it looks good close up, but the edges are too rough for a wide shot.

Diffuse:

Opacity

The noise size is smaller than the diffuse, which accounts for the detail.

Note -- If the noise size of both the diffuse and opacity maps were the same, we would have a very puffy generalized look more suited to smoke than flames.

Here we pull self illumination back to 0 and change the type of transparency to additive:

If self-illumination is left on we have this:

So much for the material.

Super Spray

You really need to pile up the faces to get a good effect. You don’t necessarily need to show them at 100% viewport and you probably don’t want to. This is to demonstrate the actual amount of faces.

 

Speed and rate

This shows we are emitting 20 faces at each frame. The speed is 50 units per frame with only a slight variation..

Life span

Start time, stop, and display is up to you. The life is what is critical, for the burst to have the effect of an inferno burst, with some variation in the span of the faces.

Facing

Facing particles is a must:

Speed of the rotation

In 5 frames each particle will spin once. The phase is the initial “tilt” of the particle.