[Bf-committers] Flame simulation patch and tutorial

[Lukas Tönne]

Hi,

I would like to publish my current flame simulation patch. I started
this a few months ago as a little experiment to get into Blender
coding.

http://www.pasteall.org/12202/diff

Basic info on the targeted feature and motivation, apart from me
learning Blender code, can be found here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Phonybone/Fire_simulation

The current code is able to produce some nice fire effects, for
examples look here:
http://www.vimeo.com/album/166313

It has a fair amount of bugs and missing features and is not
svn-ready, which is why i just paste the patch here. As i said, it was
just an experiment and i don't really feel compelled to continue
working on this seriously (i am much more interested in improving the
general particle system design, which proved to be a big hurdle for
these kinds of extensions). However i also don't want to let this code
rot on my harddrive, which is why i make it public for anyone willing
to try it out. If someone is really interested i can of course
continue development, but i just don't see that much need for it atm.

The simulation is quite cumbersome to set up properly (partially due
to volumetric rendering intricacies), so i wrote a tutorial:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Phonybone/Fire_simulation_tutorial

For a list of missing features see here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Phonybone/Fire_simulation_todo

With the smoke simulator and the upcoming SPH implementation i think
we already have some great tools to simulate fire in Blender. I may
update the code and tutorial from time to time if feedback is
positive, but i'd rather like to concentrate on particle system code
design from now on.