Falloff is set to OUT 50% with a complete black filter:

Alternatively, you can get a lot more radiance into your fire by changing to additive trx:

No specular. Here are our maps:

particle age color 2 is positioned at 10% ... color 3 is just red-orange ...

The noise looks like this; color 1, yellow and orange

color 2 is orange and red

color 3 is just orange-red.

The opacity gradient is radial and uses blur studio’s electric plugin for colors 2 and 3. Go to http://www.maxplugins.de and search for electric for your version of Max. This helps get the fire tendril effect. [If you do not have the plugin, use fractal noise.]

You will also need this file also copied to your plugin folder.

Here are the Electric settings for colors 2 and 3 [they are identical]:

This is what the electric looks like; if you cannot get the plugin, you could make this effect in photoshop using the clouds filter.

The Mat might look dark in the material display slot. That’s because an 8.0 Omni light set to include only the fire is providing the main illumination for the effect.

Now for the particle system ... the parray is linked to a burning, moving object:. Note that the particle formation is from a distinct number of random points that you can determine. If you wanted to have the fire emit from only the top of an object you could use selected subobjects, with a selection of polygons in the modifier stack.

The speed is set to 0, becasue we are using the wind alone to move the particles. The spin controls keep the fire moving and not look like static faces.

The first spherical wind binding is linked to the traveling object. Note the wind is set to a negative number, pulling the fire up towards it.

The drag makes particles slow down over time ... x10  y25  z10 ... the vertical axis Y is being set here to 25% of its non-dragged height so the fire is not too high.

the 2^nd wind is set to 0 and is only turbulence, the way wind might affect fire ... it is positioned around our traveling emitter, and linked ...

Add image blur 0.2

Try a glow if you like ... the numbers will have to be quite low ... also you can flicker the 8.0 omni light ... set up a regular omni light for general scene illumination

8.0 light only includes the parray:

This shows adding a lens effect ... glow:

Without the bur electric plug in we can still can get a good fire .. this uses a noise map. Play around with the noise settings. To see the noise, turn off show end result in the material editor:

This noise looks like this:

change the levels and we get this: