Fire

[MSzwarc]

Gray Creager's thread about Dream Projects put me in mind of another scene I've thought would be interesting, but I simply can't figure out how to do it. The scene would be a crash-landed WWI fighter with the engine aflame, and the pilot just beginning to crawl from the cockpit. I can't figure out how one might model flames that would be at least somewhat realistic.

I have Shep Paine's diorama book, and understand how a muzzle flash or candle flame might be simulated in a shadowbox setup, but the scene I have in mind would be in the round, and in broad daylight. Has anyone ever seen such an effect modeled, or does anyone have any ideas on how it might be accomplished?

 

[Lou Masses]

eeesh!

Build a couple of them and burn them in front of viewers?

That's a tough one Mike. Even smoke is hard, cotton looks like cotton. I suppose you could embed small litghbulbs in the model and add elements to make it look real but frankly the only time I've ever seen convincing fire is in shadow baoxes where you can control the lighting.

Lou

 

[John Long]

I've seen these things around Halloween that are very convincing if you could apply them to scale. They use red, orange and yellow fabric a light bulb and a small fan. The fan provides the movement and the light provides luminescence. I don't know what they're called, and I hope I've described it well enough. I've often thought about tinting gloss gel medium and teasing it out to form flames. I may experiment with that.

Sam Garcia did a couple of dioramas incorporating fire. I think it was basically putty painted like fire. One diorama had a Marine lighting up a cave with a flamethrower. It was very convincing.

 

[Lou Masses]

The fire is really good in that photo. Only thing is the smoke looks like stone or dried lava, but not smoke.

 

[John Long]

Originally posted by Lou Masses@Mar 29 2004, 01:01 PM
The fire is really good in that photo. Only thing is the smoke looks like stone or dried lava, but not smoke.

Agreed. Smoke would be harder than fire. Same thing with a debris cloud from an explosion.

 

[MSzwarc]

Build a couple of them and burn them in front of viewers?

Gee, Lou, I suppose that would work, but doesn't it then become performance art? :lol: :lol:

John, I understand your description of the Halloween novelty, but I don't think actual movement of the flames is what I'm looking for. However... the idea of using some kind of transparent medium (the gels you mentioned?) with maybe some kind of flickering light source to illuminate them (as Lou suggests) might be worth investigating.

You guys would have to bring up smoke. I hadn't even considered how much smoke an oily fire would give off! Maybe a model locomotive smoke generator?

 

[mikec55]

Mike,

Maybe some artistically shredded cotton balls could be made to look like smoke. Never tried it myself, but it's the 1st thing that sprang to mind.

Mike

Whooops!--just reread Lou's reply about cotton so never mind.

 

[John Long]

Monroe Perdue sells a flickering LED gizmo. I've never seen one, but I've seen things like them. It might be worth a look. I think they're in the link section.

 

[Bryon Ray]

Years ago when I was a lad, about the time they invented dirt. I had visited a model shop in Omaha , NE. The whole center of the shop was military dios. One of them impressed me so much that I nearly never survived childhood. It was a dio of some Brit WWII desert raiders sitting around a campfire drinking coffee.
The fire was made from shag carpet fibers yellows orange and red , looked good tried it out with Moms new family room carpet. I still have mental scars....

 

[bwildfong]

Hey all,

I've been lurking around this great site for a while, and I've finally found a question that I might be able to offer an answer to - replicating fire.

I recently finished a figure (Andrea's Indiana Jones in 54mm) holding a flaming torch. The challenge was to "freeze" the action of a flickering flame; since the rest of the vignette was a frozen moment, to have the flame as the only moving thing in the scene would look decidedly odd.

To form the flames, I cut very small pieces of clear plastic kitchen wrap (a.k.a. Saran Wrap) and superglued one edge of each piece to the torch. Once that had set up, I used tweezers to pull the edges into ragged flame-like shapes. The result was pretty realistic replication of a thin tongue of flame flowing off the tip of the torch. To paint it, I added transparent washes of acrylic yellow and reddish orange. The painted flames look a bit comic-bookish in terms of colour (I'll have to experiment with more blues and oranges in the future), but I think they at least look like micro-thin tongues of fire.

Hope this may provide some inspiration.

Cheers,

Brian

 

[MSzwarc]

Thanks for the info, Brian. I've been doing a little experimenting myself, and I think we're on the right track: using a transparent material colored with transparent colors. This gives the flame the correct see-through quality.

My own experiments consisted of mixing 6-minute epoxy, and teasing it into flame shapes as it set. The epoxy seems to go from unshapable liquid to unworkable solid quite quickly. Once set, I colored it with Gunze-Sangyo transparent acrylics, and then overcoated with matte varnish to kill the gloss (flame emits light, but is not glossy). The result is a convincing see-through flame, and would probably look even better with an LED or optic fiber embedded in the epoxy to make the flame emit light.

I'll try the plastic wrap method. It sounds as though it may be a little easier to form flames than the epoxy method.

I've also had some luck with smoke: 0000 steel wool. It's much more convincing than cotton, and holds its shape reasonably well. Although the color is convincing as is, the wool obviously needs to be painted to protect it from rust. I haven't got that far with my experiments yet, but I'll try to post some pics when I've got something to show.

 

[caramba]

Hi,
some pics and article about dio with blazing panther....
http://www.digitaldioramas.com/2002/jul02/...s/dd_garcia.php