Fluid dynamics.
One of our clients wanted to exhibit their cooking appliances with a realistic gas flame animation. We've simulated flowing water, candle flames and steam effects previously in our animation work, but never in such close-up detail.
Phoenix by Chaos is a fluid dynamics plugin that simulates fire, smoke, liquids, splashes and sprays. To simplify the process the software has many presets where parameters can be tweaked to suit the requirements of each project.
Playing with fire.
Starting from pretty much zero awareness we experimented and tested the software over the course of a few weeks to produce this final animation. The Phoenix help files are very comprehensive, with animated gifs to visualise each parameter and how it affects your simulation. We also got some great advice from the Phoenix developers who are very active on their support groups.
Getting started.
The presets make things extremely easy to get going. We crafted a the appliance based on CAD drawings and added flame emitters around the burner, after a few colour tweaks the first render test was surprisingly respectable.
Hot stuff.
For accuracy we scrutinised a real life burner flame using the SLR camera to capture close-range images. The flame shape and colours were then reproduced with adjustments in the plugin parameters. The flame itself is coloured depending on the 'temperature' that the simulation assigns to particles. The flickering movement variations are created by adding dynamic wind objects.