Foliage Paintable Fire VFX for Mölbrotin

Fire effect that I created for the project Mölbrotin.
I am only responsible for the VFX.
Environment assets and set dressing were done by Jonah Rausch:
https://jonah-rausch.artstation.com/

Final look of the fire in the environment

Demonstration of the fire being painted on with foliage.

I first started by creating the desired shape of the fire in Houdini. I set up two cameras for the front and side view of the fire.

I rendered out four flipbooks for the front and top view of the two different fire shapes.

Then I created a mesh that the fire material will go on. The mesh that is flat on the floor will always stay that way, but the top mesh will be camera-facing.

This is the material setup for the camera-facing fire material.

This is the material setup for the fire that stays flat on the ground

Demonstration of the angle-based opacity.

I made three variations of fire.

I placed them in the foliage tool so that I can scatter them around

Then I created a smoke flipbook and created a smoke Niagara emitter that I placed around the focused points of fire.