BLENDER

Learn how to produce a procedural animated fire as a volumetric shader using nothing but a cube primitive and shader nodes

AUTHOR Simon Thommes

Simon Thommes is a 3D generalist at the Blender Studio working mainly as a shading and lighting artist on open movie projects. Building on his technical education of a BSc in physics he developed a strong focus on the creation of procedural shaders using Blender. simon-thommes.com

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a procedural volumetric fire shader. This method has multiple benefits compared to the alternative of simulation, as no volumetric data has to be stored directly and the result can consistently be tweaked with the parameters that go into generating it.

In the following steps you will learn how to effectively work with volumetric shaders in Blender and how to set them up for both of Blender’s native render engines, Cycles and Eevee.

For the creation of the volumetric textures used by the fire we will cover various concepts and techniques of the procedural texture generation in Blender’s node-based shading system. Those concepts cover several aspects of procedural texturing in general, like creating and manipulating shapes in 3D space and using noise textures to combine different levels of detail.

A central point of these steps is the manipulation of coordinate space and combining different textures using mathematical operations, but there is no advanced knowledge needed to follow along and pick up useful ideas and tricks.

Beyond that, you will see the flame come alive with some basic techniques of procedural animation applied to a volumetric shading context. Let’s begin!

GATHER ROUND THE FIRE

A render of a campfire scene using the procedural volumetric fire shader that is shown in this tutorial

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