   Flame simulations.......
  Hi, i was wondering what different flame simulations there are. I now know of these:Particles using GL_POINTS (not much  but is works, i used it in my creative contest demo).Billboarded particles.Texturing a flame-shaped polygon, moving the texture up, looping, and moving the flame top. This is used in i believe the ps2 version of LOTR (or another fantasy war movie, anyway i saw it in the cinema, so i wouldn''t be suprised if it was a movie game). This looks pretty nice actually, and is by far the fastest.Does anyone know any other ways to create a nice flame? Just curious! 
  -Full 3D NSS (Navier-Stokes Solver), if you got quantum computer to calculate/render this in realtime, that is. You could use 2D verison to do some kind of animated billboards.-this (also non-realtime, but look nice)I would go with some semi-advanced particle system. Using rotating particles with nice animated texture can look awesome.   You should never let your fears become the boundaries of your dreams.   [edited by - _DarkWIng_ on February 14, 2004 8:17:37 AM];  You can animate a texture using Game Of Life techniques.  Each frame the colour of each pixel is dependant on the surrounding pixels from the previous frame.  This can look pretty nice, but is framerate dependant.  My first LOTR entry uses this technique if you want to take a look.  The source code is probably horrendous though!Enigma ;  A good way I''ve found while doing my demo is to use billboarded particles with the following algorithm:(initialization)random size, horizontal angle of release, vertical angle of release, and life.(for each frame)decrease the life and reset if it''s "dead".have a set gravity pulled to the centre.If the velosity inwards is bigger than the distance from the centre, make the velosity equal to the distance.You''ll get a nice flame shaped system that way! ;  You want a nice flame? Try ''Macintosh suck, WINDOWS is t3h rulez0r!'' Back to the *real* topic... something I''ve used but not seen elsewhere is fractal noise with a texture on it. You scroll the different noise layers at different speeds (high frequencies faster) and then do some stretching so it looks like it''s accelerating...check this blatant plug to see what I mean. Requires java.I''d like to see what this same algorithm looks like in 3D... ;  Thanks fractoid! That''s some fancy and fast flame simulation you''ve got there! I now have to choose between 2 flame effects, the simple polygon flame or yours.By the way, your meta balls, aren''t they just some lightmaps moving around the screen ?;  No problem. : )Yeah, the metaballs are gaussian bumps added together with a palette on them. A sharper gradient (or two sharp gradients) would have made them more metablobby... when I wrote that I was obsessed with 3D metablobs but hadn''t yet quite figured them out, so 2D was all I could do. 