Fire Starter

Overview

At the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida, animation students often want to include visual effects, such as fire, in their projects. However, students lack the time to become proficient in the software and skills necessary to create these simulations. Prebuilt solutions, such as bifrost in Maya, lack customization features.

Fire Starter is a Houdini plug-in that enables artists to quickly create simple fire effects for export to Maya. There are two types of fire an artist can create: “Campfire” or “Spread”. The Campfire simulation creates source geometry inside of Houdini and produces an in-place, bonfire-like simulation. The Spread simulation allows artists to import their own geometry, stagnant or animated, and uses Houdini’s underlying tools to create the spread simulation across the given mesh. Once artists finish creating their simulation in Houdini, they can export it to a series of .VDB files for rendering in Maya with Arnold.

Spread

UI for the spread simulation

Result of running spread simulation

Campfire

UI for campfire simulation

Rendered result of Campfire simulation

If you're interested in learning more, I wrote Medium articles while working on this project. You can read more about the process, starting here.