6 ms·
Why is it so hard to make digital fire look good?
- TulliusCicero 3y agoHmm, are there any examples of movies or TV shows with good or at least decent digital fire? (or games I guess)
- psd1 3y agoQuake 2's polygonal fire stands the test of time, I think. Unfortunately they have low animation frame count, but the solidity is satisfying. https://youtu.be/6vigqSrhjfI https://youtu.be/6vigqSrhjfI
- lozenge 3y agoThe low frame rate probably helps sell the illusion. Your mind fills in what they couldn't program.
- psd1 3y agoTo me, it's glaringly obvious, and it gets me every time. I'm not particularity sensitive to frame rate. It also serves to prove the thesis of TFA, since they certainly don't look photorealistic. Despite that, I do think they look gorgeous.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoIt also serves to prove the thesis of TFA, How does a low texture res mushroom cloud with a few dozen polygons from a 26 year old video game "prove the thesis since it doesn't look photorealistic"? This has no connection at all to how modern fire effects are done. That's like seeing a cave drawing and claiming no painting can ever look realistic.
- raspyberr 3y agoHow 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.
- smusamashah 3y agoI scrolled over and thought something must be wrong with my browser or the ad-blocker is being too aggressive. Came here to see if people have been discussing any screenshots.
- superhumanuser 3y agoCame here to ask this very question!
- danhau 3y agoI instinctively scanned the article for pictures, but didn‘t find any. I closed the tab after 6 seconds.
- dvh 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphomania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphomania
- teddyh 3y agoUsually, these articles about movies, clothing, art, or geography don’t have a single picture, even though what they are discussing is inherently graphical. I suspect that it’s because people who read these articles don’t care, because they don’t read them to become actually informed, they read them simply to feel smarter. (Repost of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349455>) A related phenomenon is the same kind of article, but full of irrelevant stock images. (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37167492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37167492>)
- alephnan 3y agoAre we any better at rendering water? Obviously there’s this which pops in every thread on the matter. Rightfully so. https://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/ https://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/
- morjom 3y agoOr for a more stylized option, Sea of Thieves (video game by Rare)
- lm28469 3y agoThis was new when I was still in uni, it's at least 10 years old so I sure hope we got better
- aceazzameen 3y agoHave you seen Avatar 2? The water is the star.
- Notatheist 3y agoMaking 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: >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. 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!".
- atoav 3y agoA lot of times you will not do the fire in 3D, but you just in compositing by adding fire from one of your thousand movie libraries. The problem of course is that you can do that and it might even look good if you match the angle, but you will have a hard time lighting the scene probably, and faking all reflections in. As someone who worked as a camera person I want to emphasize another aspect: Shooting the real thing (fire) is itself not without its challenges. You really need to match light levels well or else you won't even notice fire in the picture. Fire doesn't always burn in visually pleasing ways, and especially outside wind can make or break how it will look.
- crazygringo 3y ago> Making a realistic CG fire isn't hard. I can (and do) do it by myself on my home desktop. Can you really? On the clothing of a human body that's in motion in a strong wind? That accurately illuminates that human and the environment around them? And the fire and illuminated objects are all properly reflected on adjacent shiny surfaces like car window and car hood? Because that's the scenario presented at the very top of the article. And it does indeed sound dastardly difficult. Or while it's maybe possible with enough painstaking work, it's difficult enough that no movie would ever have a large enough budget for it. (Although I really do wonder if we have accurate enough physics models of the igniting gases to truly realistically show the way licks of flames ignite in a strong wind -- as opposed to a more bog-standard campfire type.)
- chupapimunyenyo 3y agoI'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
- dylan604 3y ago[flagged]
- chupapimunyenyo 3y ago[flagged]
- dylan604 3y ago[flagged]
- CyberDildonics 3y agoYou are absolutely right, the entire premise is nonsense, but good luck convincing anyone. A blog title assumes it's true, it must be written in stone.
- smokel 3y agoI recently browsed the source code of Little Big Adventure, and there are some hints in the comments of FIRE.ASM [1]: TEST AH,65h ; Wanna know why 60h? Me too. JNZ @@nx ; This is pure experience. ; ok but it's better with 65 [1] https://github.com/2point21/lba1-classic/blob/main/SOURCES/FIRE.ASM https://github.com/2point21/lba1-classic/blob/main/SOURCES/F...
- sillywalk 3y agoCool, I didn't know it had been open sourced.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoWhat do these two lines of assembly from a 30 year old pixel art video game have to do with realistic fire in modern visual effects?
- dimgl 3y agoRemnant 2 has some pretty impressive looking fire. Especially for the Red Prince fight. Random video of the fight: https://youtu.be/Kk6HK0PRbCc https://youtu.be/Kk6HK0PRbCc
- ourmandave 3y agoI don't know about fire, but here's a video from Corridor Crew explaining Why CG Explosions Suck and how to make them better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPb7yUPcKhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPb7yUPcKhk
- CyberDildonics 3y agoEvery video these guys make is all about how the people actually doing the cutting edge work don't know what they're doing and these youtube guys know everything. To anyone with actual experience they sound like juniors who have almost no idea what they are talking about when it comes to high end cg.
- spacecadet 3y ago[flagged]
- kylecazar 3y agoI 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. I highly recommend people watch the film and then read about it's production after, as I did.
- ggrelet 3y agoIf you are talking about W. Friedkin’s Sorcerer I suggest also to watch the original movie it’s a remake of: « Le Salaire de la Peur » by H.G. Clouzot
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoExcellent movie. Roy Scheider not the best choice of leading man, but still solid.
- chupapimunyenyo 3y ago[flagged]
- Swiffy0 3y agoHasn't no one tried to approach this with AI? 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. 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? 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. 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,... 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. So the question is; am I just overly optimistic and dumb, or isn't this a relatively easy thing to do?
- layer8 3y agoYou probably need training data of the “superficially looks like realistic fire but the details are wrong” kind, or otherwise you’ll get the “but the fingers are all weird” equivalent of image generation.
- rperez333 3y agoPixar/Disney used AI to enhance their latest Elemental characters. They did a technical presentation 2 months ago month at Siggraph: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3587421.3595467 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3587421.3595467 There are videos showing the results with/without the AI detail pass.
- TRyanMooney 3y agoProfessional Stuntman opinion here. I've both been on fire and laid in pre-comped fire for reference videos. 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. 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. I'll list some examples below.
- TRyanMooney 3y agoMy Fire burn reel - https://youtu.be/3JpNBj3-Xjw https://youtu.be/3JpNBj3-Xjw Look at the different movements and interactions I have with the fire and the fire has with itself as I move and spin. Not impossible to replicate digitally, but would require so much painstakingly detailed work that the cost of it outweighs the cost of doing it practical. Budget wise, you have 2 options. Pay for a vfx version that is good but not perfect, or pay for a practical fire burn. Practical burns come with an added benefit of getting a better performance from your actors - https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy31ycnv300/?img_index=2 https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy31ycnv300/?img_index=2 The second slide of this series is a very small burn. It would have been easy to do with a light effect and vfx. What you would likely lose is the performer reacting in an authentic way. The head tilt from feeling the warmth. The delicateness of removing the jacket swiftly without touching the fire. All these things get lost when there is not a real fire element to influence it.
- layer8 3y agoI 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.
- saturn5k 3y agoEmberGen - for those who want to play with fire and smoke physics. Also take a look at some Houdini fire reels, those effects look pretty real to me.