Harlan Skinner - Pyro-technician

*Harlan also created a short fire movie, click here to download.

I started working in Softimage a year ago.  I got started about half way through the school year in Gravette EAST.  I only got to work in the program for a total of around 1 ½  months.  I worked in Softimage 3d which is a different version of Softimage from XSI  I also attended a class for a week that a  professional animator taught, which was about the 3d version.  The only thing was for the project we worked in XSI which is different from 3d.  It took awhile to finally get used to the interface but now I  know where  the tools are at.  Another big thing that set me back, was that I had never worked in the particle system for more than a day.  All of the values are confusing at first, but then I read and did some little tutorials about them.  Which made the system much easier to use.

The fire

The following is how I built the fire. 

For the logs in the fire all I did was get some cylinders, scale them to size, randomize them (to get a more real look) and then put them in place.  The textures were pretty easy, all I did was get a wood texture and change the values around until they looked good.  The hard part was trying to get them to look like they had been burning for awhile, and hadn’t been just put in the fire.  So what I did was duplicate each log, one at a time, then scale them to certain areas to make it look like the existing logs had charcoal on them. 

            The mounds of clay around the fire where really hard.  They where just primitive spheres that I tagged points on and dragged them until they looked like they had ran down the sides of the pit then dried.  After that I just randomized them.  When I tried this at first they just didn’t look right and it took awhile before I finally got them to look right.  The textures on the rocks where made by the supervisor of the project, they where just pictures of clay that were darkened in the middle to make it look like they had charcoal on them.  That didn’t take to long to figure out though, I was using UV to apply the texture, and she just changed the black spot around.

            The particles in the scene where the hardest overall, they took a long time until I finally got them right.  I started out just trying to use a regular particle cloud, but that looked really bad.  They didn’t look like a fire no matter what values I changed.  Then someone said something about creating an explosion.  I tried that but it didn’t look good, until I took out the sparks and changed the values of the smoke and the flame.  At first the flame kept lighting up real bright with the smoke in the scene.  I tried taking the smoke out and it would be fine.  Then I  made the rate of them both higher, and sped up the flame, and slowed down the smoke.  The rate of the smoke is higher than the rate of the flame because that’s how it is in real life.  The colors of the flame and smoke where just the default ones.

For the barbecue I just got three cylinders, scaled them, randomized them, and then moved them into position.  The textures are just simple wood textures with changed values.  The stack of wood behind the fire was also just cylinders that had been scaled, randomized and moved.  The ground is just a grid that’s randomized with tagged points dragged down in the middle for the pit.  The charcoal look is a grid with points that where tagged and dragged into position.