How do you add fire effects to a video?

Answer 1

Good morning!

The easiest way to do this is with the CC Particle World emitter in After Effects. You can see a quick example of where I utilized this technique in the "MAD Magazine Animation & Motion Graphics" section of my online portfolio. If you scroll down to Issue #538, you can see how I used CC Particle World to create both fire effects and electrical effects.

Make sure you have a new comp open and then create a new solid (layer - new - solid; a black solid will allow you to see your flame effects very well). Once your solid is on your stage, go to the "Effects & Presets" menu on the right hand side and type "particle" into the search bar. You'll get a few options; grab "CC Particle World", and just drag it right over onto your stage. This applies the particle effect to that new solid, and on the left hand side of your work are you'll now see the "effect control" panel next to your "project panel". You can also access the effect controls by expanding your solid layer in the timeline; this is where you'll tweak you effect settings and set things like opacity and key frames for it .If you were to just press play on your timeline now, you'd see something that looked like a fountain of sparks shooting out from a center point (this is your emitter). Now it's time to tweak some settings to get fire! Woo hoo!

There are a lot of neat online tutorials that demonstrate SO many different settings to produce an array of fire & flame effects, but here are the basics to get you started. Once you get the basics down, just keep experimenting with various settings in the effects menu to see what you create:

Change your longevity to something like 2 or 3. This will dictate the height of your flames.

Open the physics menu and change your velocity to 0. This will tell the particle emitter that our flame is only effected by gravity. You may notice that your "flame" on the stage is facing downward though. Go to the gravity setting and change it to a negative number. You'll notice that your flame is now facing up, but depending on the negative number you used, your flame changes height, shape, and opacity. Try -10 first, then change it to -1. See the difference? Our flame is still too high, so let's try a negative decimal. Try -.5; our flame doesn't get shorter, but it does deepen in color. Now try -.01 or -.02. -.02 looks better to me, so let's go with that.

If you were to press play right now, you'd see a really basic flame effect in place. Mostly just a straight column of fire; but that means we're on the right track. Now we want to change the particle type to get the flame looking more realistic. Let the animation continue to play (this way you can see what particle looks best to you) and open the particle drop down. Try a few different particle types: "star" looks silly, but "shaded sphere" looks like a neat, heavy, greasy flame to me. Still not realistic, though. "Bubble" looks cool, but may not be as realistic as we need for this project. I used "tetrahedron" with a few tweaks for the MAD animation, so let's try that. Now, make some adjustments to "death size", "size variation", and "max opacity"

I used a death size of .01 to give my flame more of a campfire-size feel, but you can go a little higher for a larger fire. I used size variation of 100%, and a max opacity of 15%. Again, you can play with these settings until your flame looks good to you. Remember, it's your fire. :)

Now we want to place our emitter close to the ground plane. Go up to the "producer" drop down menu and set the "position Y" to .13 and the "position Z" to -0.52. You'll see your flame move down to the very bottom of your stage. But what if you're creating a scene with depth, say a campfire with people around it? Try adjusting the "position Z" to something like -0.05 instead. Now your flame is "in" the scene a little bit. Since this is a campfire, let's make our emitter a little bit bigger. Change your "radius X" to .05 or .075 and see how that affects the width of your fire. Now, to finish this up and give it a more realistic flame effect, right click on you white solid layer in the timeline and hit "pre-compose" and select "move all attributes into the new composition". You can always go back into this comp and make changes to your flame as you see fit. Now, go back into your "effects & presets" menu and type in "blur" select "CC Vector Blur" and drag it onto the new stage. This means your applying it to this NEW COMP, not the original flame emitter comp. Go to the "vector blur" effects control and play with the "amount". I chose 30, but you can use a number that creates a flame effect more to your liking. The last thing I want to do is add some irregularity to the flames. Go to your effects & presets menu one more time and type in "displace"; choose "turbulent displace" and drag it onto your stage. You can play with the "amount", "size", and "complexity" values here, but I wouldn't mess with too much else. That's about it. There is a lot more that you can do to make the flames more realistic, change direction, change color, etc, but these are the basics. Have fun and good luck! -MF