So as the title indicates, I’ve been playing with fire effects in Blender recently. It seems that making cool animations with them is especially popular but I’ve found that rendering fire of any significant size makes my render times explode so I’ve had to curtail my ambitions massively. At the same time, it felt like a good opportunity to experiment with darker scenes and maybe some atmospheric lighting as well. Like so:

In some cases, as with candles, I’ve found that fake flame actually looks better that the fire created by Blender. It’s also quite difficult to properly light a scene if the only source of illumination is supposed to be a candle. You can’t just turn up the strength of the single flame because its light would become too bright and oversaturate everything nearby while still not being bright enough to light up the scene as a whole. Click to view larger versions of these images.

Finally this fireplace scene took nearly 30 hours to render. Most of that is probably due to the volumetric nature of lighting a large fire but also because I relied on reflections off of the diffuse surfaces that form the walls and ceiling to help light the scene. I probably should have used fake lighting instead.