Fire,
fire, fire...nothing satisfies the 3D-loving soul quite
like a beautiful fire. This is part one of a two tutorial
series for creating a full-blown fire animation. In
this tutorial, I will show you how to make the fire
material.
 Open
the Material Editor by pressing 'M' on the keyboard.
 Select
an unused orb. Once highlighted, click on the Sample
Type in order to select the square shape. The square
shape will make it easier to see what the fire will
look like in the rendered scene.
Under the Shader Basic Prameters, make sure that Blinn
and Face Map are chosen.
 Lower
the Specular Level and Glossiness to '0.'
 Open
the Diffuse slot and click on the Standard button and
choose Gradient. Your cube should look like as though
there is a blend of black to white moving from top
to bottom in the material editor's view port. However,
the colors need to change.
 Select
each of the color slots from top to bottom, selecting
Red, Orange, and Yellow. The Gradient Type should be
Radial and the Noise amount can be raised to '1.0'
with a size of '15'. The size number may change later
and can be tweaked to better suite your scene. Choose
Fractal as well.
 Back
out of this material and copy it to the Opacity slot.
 Select
the Opacity material and change the three colors to
Black, Grey, and White. Once completed select the Gradient
button (while still in the Opacity material) and change
it to a Mask. Keep the old map as a sub-map.
 Under
the Mask option, select another Gradient. This time
make the three colors black, white, black. You can
add Noise (Fractal, amount of one, and size of 15),
although you can feel free to play with the numbers
to produce more refined qualities in the fire.
This completes the creation of the
fire material. The next step will be applying it. Go
back and proceed to Fire Animation.
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