How can you have an article about how things look without plenty of pictures? This article has one picture at the start to catch your attention but it isn't a picture of anything that's specifically referred to in the text.
Making a realistic CG fire isn't hard. I can (and do) do it by myself on my home desktop. Making a realistic CG fire for a complex hollywood production is practically impossible because:<p>>Friedlander notes that the fire scene in No Hard Feelings was part of reshoots that took place just a month and change before the film hit theaters — giving the effects team only a couple of weeks to work.<p>Literally the only reason. I'll bet you anything that team didn't have a few weeks. More like hours. A set has to be built, cameras transported, crew flown in. That overhead is accounted for. CG is considered a bunch 1s and 0s we can conjure from thin air with a few clicks. Bad directors expect miracles, don't get them, then scream "CG BAD!".
I recently browsed the source code of Little Big Adventure, and there are some hints in the comments of FIRE.ASM [1]:<p><pre><code> TEST AH,65h ; Wanna know why 60h? Me too.
JNZ @@nx ; This is pure experience.
; ok but it's better with 65
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://github.com/2point21/lba1-classic/blob/main/SOURCES/FIRE.ASM">https://github.com/2point21/lba1-classic/blob/main/SOURCES/F...</a>
Professional Stuntman opinion here. I've both been on fire and laid in pre-comped fire for reference videos.<p>It's hard because of the randomness associated with flame physics. It's near impossible to look good because of the lack of interaction of the set and performers.<p>Where VFX fire shines is in layering additional fire elements into a shot with with real fire. It makes a bigger scene without adding safety concerns to the crew.<p>I'll list some examples below.
I don't know about fire, but here's a video from Corridor Crew explaining <i>Why CG Explosions Suck</i> and how to make them better.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPb7yUPcKhk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPb7yUPcKhk</a>
Hasn't no one tried to approach this with AI?<p>I'd figure it wouldn't be too hard to record couple of hundred of hours of different kinds of fires burning, maybe "re-encode" / transform all the frames from pixel data to a more convenient representation like motion vectors or something and turn that into some sort of model.<p>Maybe a ControlNet- or motion model to use with Stable Diffusion? Or some kind of proprietary output model which could be used with video editing software / motion capture?<p>Usually the hardest part with AI seems to be coming up with the data to train with. In this case, that should be the least of one's problems.<p>You could even record fires in front of a green screen and, hell, setup it like so that you can control variables like wind direction with fan(s), intensity of the fire, temperature of the fire,...<p>I might even be possible to train the model "in reverse", in such a way the the goal for the AI is to come up with correct set of motion vectors, when given wind direction and speed, intensity and temperature as inputs. Since you can control these variables and record the real result, you have the ground truth for something like reinforcement learning.<p>So the question is; am I just overly optimistic and dumb, or isn't this a relatively easy thing to do?
I was just recently watching a movie from the '70s, and couldn't figure out why specifically the fire looked so amazing. It was called Sorcerer. Turns out, they actually blew up a bunch of stuff, including a stuntman.<p>I highly recommend people watch the film and then read about it's production after, as I did.
Are we any better at rendering water?<p>Obviously there’s this which pops in every thread on the matter. Rightfully so. <a href="https://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/</a>
Remnant 2 has some pretty impressive looking fire. Especially for the Red Prince fight. Random video of the fight: <a href="https://youtu.be/Kk6HK0PRbCc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/Kk6HK0PRbCc</a>
I always wanted a virtual fireplace that doesn’t look like shit or is just a video that loops after 10 minutes. Not sure we’ll get there within my lifetime.
I'll claim something and provide the same amount of evidence as this article:
This is bullshit. Creating realistic looking fire is very common nowadays even on consumer end hard/software and thousands of people do it everyday. This article is simply untrue