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I'm doing an animation on a 2D plane. I have some 3D objects on it. Now I would like to show some fire. I know I can follow some smoke and fire tutorials and add this. But rendering takes very long.

Is there a way I can add 'simulated' fire/flames that doesn't need to bake and render so much? I was thinking of trying to search an animated gif of fire and try to render this (never done this) but I have no idea if this would be the way to go.

Any suggestions?

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  • $\begingroup$ It's possible to do via VFX, like maybe here. But you'll need to do some motion tracking and provide it with recorded footages of the flame burning. Gifs won't work here at least because Blender doesn't work with them, if possible use OpenEXR. $\endgroup$ – Mr Zak Jun 7 '17 at 11:58
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You may fake a fire effect using animated movie e.g. .avi or .mov (.gifs are not supported as @Mr Zak said) to project it (using image seqence texture node) on a plane with transparency. enter image description here

Add a plane and unwrap it. Download a fire animation from web (in my case I downloaded an explosion .avi file from here: http://wrathgames.com/blog/2011/12/25/explosion-animation-1/). Go to material nodes editor and set up the nodes as pictured below: enter image description here

Set up the Emission node's strenght as you like. You might also use a Light Path node to get rid of the shadow casting by a projected movie clip.

To make the plane always face the camera (for the fly through animations e.g.) use this solution: How can I make a plane always look at camera?

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  • $\begingroup$ "Add a plane and unwrap it. " how do you "unwrap" a plane? :x $\endgroup$ – juFo Jun 7 '17 at 15:17
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    $\begingroup$ Select the plane, enter the Edit Mode, select all the vertices with A and press U-->Unwrap. $\endgroup$ – Paul Gonet Jun 7 '17 at 15:19
  • $\begingroup$ ok i've found out now that if you create the plane you don't see it, you need to move it over another object to get it working, because it is transparent :-). Now how do I control the start time. I want the animation to start at frame 65 of my animation and then repeat it 2 (or 3 tmes) (but not show it before frame 65), so i've set the Start Frame to 65 and turned on cyclic and there is still something visible before frame 65. $\endgroup$ – juFo Jun 8 '17 at 7:34
  • $\begingroup$ Set the Start Frame to 65 and the Frames to 150 and it should work as you want. Unfortunatelly you can't animate these properties. Though you may add multiple planes with the different setings and animate their visibility on a timeline. $\endgroup$ – Paul Gonet Jun 8 '17 at 12:43
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    $\begingroup$ I've added a Transparent BSDF and Mix shader. The Emission I link to the Mix shader. Now I can easily set the Fac: of the mix shader from 1 to 0 to make it visible or not and keyframe it :-) $\endgroup$ – juFo Jun 8 '17 at 13:39

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