Pyrocluster Flamethrower, Cinema 4D.

Hi all, I rescued this from a forum I posted in a while ago..

I wanted to recreate a flamethrower for a Science Fiction scene I was working on. Not only did I want the flamethrower to look good I wanted it to behave organically. Pyrocluster to the rescue! Now this was written for Cinema 4D r11 but to my knowledge would be fine in r12 or even r9+ if you have the plugins for the older versions.

Lets get stuck in!

Firstly let me just say that much of the development of this came with the help from Mechmaster and Billy-Home over at Project Dalek, without their ‘prods-in-the-right-direction’ I probably wouldn’t have gotten to this point!

Anyway…..

Where to begin!?! 

1) Well firstly start with a blank canvas then create a plain, create an area light with are shadows enabled, turn AO on in render settings
2) In the materials manager create two new Pyro materials; click file>shader>pyrocluster then click file>shader>pyroclusterVolumeTracer
3) Create a simple emitter and (under lights) create an environment object. (in R13 go simulate>Particle>Emitter)
4) Create a gravity deformer

Now you have the basic core parts available to hand,

4) Drop the Pyrocluster material on the emitter to give it a material
5) Drop the PyroclusterVolumeTracer on to the environment object
5) Move the timeline slider to around 40 (you should see the little particles being emitted in a linear way)
6) Render the region and you have basic fog!

Now starts the time consuming tweaking! Take a look at the attributes of my emitter:

I have also set the X/Y-Size on the ‘emitter’ tab in attributes to 1m x 1m.

Now take a look at my attributes for the ‘fog’ like Pyrocluster Material:

These wettings will get you a cone shaped emitter with a ‘fire’ like material on the particles. Let me quote Mechmaster here;
“There are a number of ways to alter the shape of Pyrocluster effects. The simplest is to mess with the emitter angles so that the Pyro “puffs” don’t simply travel at right angles to the emitter, useful if you want your effect to spread outward but not something you can really fine tune.
You can get a more controllable cone effect using the Radius gradient on the Age tab. You set the size of the puffs on the Shape tab as normal and then use the Radius gradient to modify it, pure black on the gradient equals Radius 0, pure white equals the size you set on the Shape tab. So if you set the size to 200 and your Radius gradient runs from pure black to pure white the puffs will be created at zero size and grow smoothly until they reach radius 200 at their point of death.

For a flame effect you can also use the Luminosity gradient so that the flame starts out really bright but cools and darkens a little as it ages. For the colours, set really bright colours on the Globals page, white through yellow to bright orange for example and then set the Colour gradient on the Age tab to darker colours, orange through red to brown. You can use the Colour Mix gradient to control the transition, pure black makes your puffs 100% the colour set on the Globals tab while pure white makes them 100% the colour set on the Age tab.


So as you can see there are a plethora of tweaks that will alter the appearance of your emission. I have also noted that there is a direct relationship between the radius of the Pyro material (accessed through ‘shape’ with the attributes) and the emitter lifetime, play with these settings to create a totally different look (I wont go into this anymore here as its not part of the flame effect)

I have added two deformers to the affect the emission, a gravity deformer and a turbulence deformer. These help to tone down the linear look of the cone and (see my settings below) can give you a large amount of control over the shape of the emission. Note: the deformers need not be parented to the emitter!
I have placed the deformers like so:

Turbulence:
 

Gravity:

You can then move the deformers along the stream of the emission to get different results on render!
I think that covers the way I created the flame thrower on my Movie Dalek. If I have missed something I will re-iterate this but I cant seem to find anything missing 

I hope that helps someone and with some tweaking you’ll be able to create something entirely unique!