Quest for Fire

So if you ask around the beginning animator's world, supposedly fire is a total bitch to animate. If you're striving to achieve the most realistic fire as possible you might as well give up and die now while you're ahead or suffer a horribly slow death of frustration and many numbers and nodes and halo textures.

Luckily, I am an idiot, and realism has never been my number one priority.
...yet (possibly in the far-off future.)

Now, I don't actually know if other people find fire hard to animate, I just made that part up (but it's what I would tell myself whenever I wondered what it'd be like to animate things like fire.) For years I imagined that fire, smoke, explosions, and water were all things incredibly complex and difficult to animate, and complex and difficult are words I usually try to stay away from. They require work. And I loathe work. So for the most of Lazy Eyes I'd tried to stay away from creating my own fire or smoke or explosions or splashes, and when I did need these things I'd just use a pre-made template off of motion or somewhere else. The first example of this would be Grizzly Man vs. Bear Grylls.

He's getting burned alive, how can you not see this?

On a side-note I should just say I totally hate that skit and pray that maybe someday I'll redeem myself for making such a waste of screen-time. Believe it or not I'm not the only one who hates this skit.

I don't take criticism well.

In my defense, who the hell writes mean comments on a skit made by small children?! (We were 12 at the time, but we looked 9.)

Back to fire and other particle-esque things, I steered clear from making my own stuff for quite awhile out of sheer laziness. But recently I got the chance to create fire once more, and this time I decided to say "Fuck it! I'm totally gonna make my own fire, and it's going to be awesome!" 

What a fool I was. 

Now I could've just gone down the lazy path once again and used a nice pre-made template. 

A perfectly fine iMovie plugin.

A perfectly fine Motion template.

But no, pre-made things aren't cool these days. They aren't creative, or natural. We live in the age of organic crap. If our food can be organic, why can't our media? (If I actually followed this way of thinking I'd also be having to create my own soundtracks to my skits, which'll never happen as I do not have access to a proper orchestra
...the school symphony orchestra does not count.)

So, in search of my own organic fire, I went looking for a program to create my soon-to-be-born (sparked?) flames in. Soon enough I rediscovered a copy of Blender in my applications folder (off of dock, off of mind,) opened it up, and came face-to-face with.... 

THIS!!

...So many freaking buttons.
Shit.

You can see how intimidating such a complex program was to me right (look! "Complex," one of my "steer clear from" words.) But, I figured I could manage. But I'd need a tutorial. A quick google search brought me this:

Hooray! A free realistic fire tutorial! It's totally free! And totally realistic! Totally! The catch: it's for Blender 2.5. I had Blender 2.49 (just .1 versions away from beautiful fire.) No worries though, Blender's free. 2.5 would take about a minute to download an install. So after 10 minutes of downloading (oh, what a speedy connection I have) I proceeded to click the install button. Lo-and-behold... "ERROR. THIS APPLICATION CANNOT RUN ON THIS SYSTEM'S ARCHITECTURE" (it said something like that, but you got the gist.) Why? Turns out my trusty lil' mac runs on 32-bit (whatever that is, that kind of talk has the same value as French for me... which is a shame because I'm in French 2 starting next week.) Blender 2.5 runs on 64-bit, and the only 32-bit versions for mac were in German and Dutch. But luckily, there was another computer in my household that could run on 64-bit. My Windows Vista. Ta-daa!!!.... shit. I hate Vista, and PCs in general. They never work for me, so I guess they must hate me too. But this wasn't a set-back, this was a solution. It'd just take about a minute to download and install Blender 2.5 onto my crappy Vista. So after 20 minutes of downloading (crappy internet + crappy computer = me sitting by the stupid PC catching up on my reading) and 5 minutes of installing ("ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO INSTALL BLENDER 2.5 ONTO YOUR PC? IT MAY CONTAIN MALICIOUS VIRUS SOFTWARE." "Yes! I'm sure!" "ARE YOU SURE SURE?" "Yes dammit you stupid Vista I'm sure sure!" "ARE YOU SURE SURE SURE?" "Gaaah!") I had opened up Blender 2.5, which I had read had been re-designed to be more user-friendly, and came face-to-face with this:

Pro: Buttons are slightly bigger
Con: There are 30% more buttons
Shit.

Lovely! So then I began my long process of following all the complex steps of my free realistic fire tutorial. After about 30 minutes of working with my free realistic fire tutorial, Blender 2.5 quit on me. So instead of following step 29 of the free realistic fire tutorial, I followed my own step 29: swear and scream and cry. After my own step 29 was finished and done, I decided to give Blender 2.5 another go. Once again, 30 minutes into the free realistic fire tutorial, Blender 2.5 quit. 

So basically, Blender 2.5 wasn't an option. I'd have to learn the complex user-mean Blender 2.49. 

It was a bit tough. After a 1/2 dozen tutorials all my efforts turned out to be something like this:

It didn't even do a cool explosion,
it just kinda flowed out in all directions. 

But I kept at it, and a few dozen tries later, my hard-work of sitting down and staring at a screen for hours watching video tutorials on Youtube (mostly this tutorial) had finally paid off.

Whoo! It looks like absolute crap!

I was so happy with the final result I even made smoke to go along with it. After a lot of rendering, I imported my footage into Final Cut to make the illusion that there was an actual forest-fire. The result was this:

Oh no! Fire!
...sort of.

Okay, so it didn't look anywhere near as good as the pre-made templates, let alone any actual cgi fire made in Hollywood. But I didn't care, this was my fire, my own organic home-made fire. For the first time in awhile, I felt content with the final product, knowing that I was the one that made what I was watching all by myself with no templates what-so-ever.
:)

...On second thought, it looks like shit, I'm using a template next time.

Oh, did I mention that after exporting the final product any everything I decided to download the German 32-bit Blender 2.5? And guess what? It's not even in German. It's English.
How I hate myself..

At least I now have time to start on my free realistic fire tutorial.
Totally!