Here is a short update on the progress this week on the gas burner pyro effect that will be in shot 1.

^ This is the flipbook of the current effect.

^ This is a sequence of the process of getting this shape so far. I first had to increase the velocity to get the pressure of the propane being released from the burner. I then started adding disturbance and dissipation. The red cone is my reference for how tall the flame is typically in real life, about 4.5 meters, so clearly I need to resize it a bit. I also changed the shape of the source to get the more slender look. I'm less concerned about the padding at the top at the moment since that will be covered by the balloon in the shot.

^ Here is a side by side of the current shape with my reference. The blue near the hot burner needs to be more prominent, and there may even need to be more velocity to get the straighter shape at the beginning.

In this video you can also see how the fire changes when the flame is turned on and off. There is also sometimes licks that burn orange around the base.

We decided the fire would be rendered out of mantra and composited with Nuke. The lighting will be faked with a lighting setup in Maya to get the light scatter on the balloon.

This is a render out of mantra where I created a geo light from the pyro in order to get a lighting reference to use in Maya when we create the lights.

The slap comp using the balloon shader and Nuke matte painting: