Flamin' Volcano

Volcano

Active volcano by the sunset

Smoke Puffs

The smoke puffs are a bit over saturated in the video. H.264 seems to like to do that. Anyways, I started this by using a tutorial found on ImbueFX to learn about having lit particles. You can see me changing the directional light's angle and having it effect the smoke in the video.

A normal map was created procedurally in the shader. The Light Vector was then used to light the particle using the created normals. It's essentially using Lambert lighting and suffers from all the problems that come with it but it's fast and good enough for smoke with no sub surface scattering or inner shadowing.

Another issue that the particle system is that it appears that all the particles must be lit (by the same light) before the particles are actually lit. I think this has to do with UDK's implementation of the Light Vector. I originally tried to only light the bottom part of the smoke stack with this orrangy spotlight but it just wouldn't take. However, you are able to light your particles using more than one light as I did in the video.

Rolling Fire

I reused the explosion material from an earlier post in order to create this fire. Since that shader was so customizable I was able to change a few parameters to get the right look of the fire. The particle animation however did take me some time. I wanted to make sure the particles blended well into the smoke puffs. By carefully changing the temperature and alpha curves and tweaking some color values I was able to do so.