Pawel Olas - LightWave Plug-in: Fire&SmokeGenerator

Fire&SmokeGenerator will allow you to achieve extremely realistic particle effects with just a few mouse clicks. You don't need to spend hours tuning many different emitters and modifiers to get acceptable results. Just a few clicks and your fire or smoke is ready! This is the main advantage of this plugin: simplicity.

"The funniest 3D particle system I've ever used...."
Martin "cybersign"

BURN EVERYTHING!

Any 3D object created with Modeler can be used as an emitter! This means that while modeling objects for your scene you can also model any emitters you will need. This allows you to emit particles from anything; for instance, campfire wood, different ventilation holes, cracks in the ground, whatever you need. You can also animate the emitter in any way you like including bones, displacement maps and other LW tools. You can even use weightmaps to vary particle emission from an object. Fire&SmokeGenerator doesn't limit you!


simple moving object	NEW SmokingBolo by Lukas Pazera 25s 400x218 3MB	emitter example	ventilation holes	camp fire animated with morph map

SMOKING BEYOND LIMITS!

Another very important advantage is that smoke from all the emitters interact with each other - they are no longer independent. If you create a few emitters near each other, their smoke will mix and have common twirls, etc., looking very realistic.


cool example of smoke mixing	three emitters with different colors mixing	pass throught	another smoke mixing

Any particle system would be useless without collision detection. Fire&SmokeGenerator has an accurate and fast collision detection system. You can build collision objects in Modeler and animate them in the same way as emitters. Making a big fan cutting through smoke is a breeze :-)


dynamic collisions with rotating object	more dynamic collisions with rotating object	camp fire with a pot	static collisions

Once you are satisfied with your particles, you can bake them into a single file and use them in your scene without your machine having to re-compute their movements.

Fire&SmokeGenerator is also equipped with an advanced gradient control for particle color. In this way, you have all relevant particle controls in one plugin (You don't need to create an additional gradient in the HyperVoxel) and you can store all information about your fire or smoke in a single preset.
You can watch gradient changes in real-time in the LW viewports.

Fire&SmokeGenerator uses presets to store your favorite settings. The full version of F&SG is shipped with many different presets ready to use with your emitters. For your convenience, you can store gradients in separate presets and try different gradient sets with the same particle movements.

You can even export particle movements to ParticleFX compatibile file and use them as a native LW particles with JetSream and other particle rendering engines.

Package contains 6 plugins:

Fire&Smoke Control Center
	This Generic plugin allows you to control all Fire&Smoke components from one panel. Also included are all common settings and main controls (that are not available in other plugins). Common tasks of this plugin are: Add/remove plugins to/from objects, start/reset simulation, copy/paste plugin's settings etc.
Fire&Smoke Generator (Emitter)
	Attach this plugin to an object from which you want to emit particles. Particles will be emitted from the surface of the object. Several controls are available to control the particles and environment (wind, random vortices, etc.).
Fire&Smoke Collision
	If you need your particles to collide with something in your scene, add this to the collision object. The collision objects can be animated in any available LW way.
Fire&Smoke Vortex
	This allows you to create a custom vortex that you can place anywhere in your scene in order to swirl the particles.
Fire&Smoke Player
	Plays baked particles from a file.
Fire&Smoke Opacity
	This is a procedural texture plugin to fix the HyperVoxels opacity problem. Use it to smoothly fade particles in and out. It uses Appear/Dissolve settings from Fire&SmokeGenerator. It can also be used on a color channel texture.


easy integration with DR Impact3	Fire&SmokeOpacity advantage	simple fire rendered with HV	propagation weight map example	CaveFire tutorial.

Feel free to try Fire&Smoke to see its power and simplicity by downloading the demo version. With it, you can play with particles, bake them, and see HyperVoxels previewed with OpenGL. The only limitation is that you cannot render the particles.
Fire&Smoke is available for Windows

and for Mac OSX