I attempted the “human torch” effect again today. I basically started from scratch; at least for the flame part. I launched Particle Illusion and imported the source footage. After that I started playing around with the emitters to figure out, which one would look and work the best.

After that I went back into Shake and loaded up yesterday’s script and started making adjustments. First of all, I changed the colors back to more red-ish, since it looks more “natural” (I don’t know why I don’t just let it look fiery?).

The final script looks a bit like this

The left part is for the flame, and the right one is for the keying and making the arm all glowy (come to think of it, I could add some more glow to the whole thing… well, maybe in part 3).

For now I think I’ve done a pretty good job. I only have to figure out how to close the flame up better (the Warper didn’t do the trick, at least not in the five minutes that I’ve spend working with it).

I’ve also uploaded a test render.

Watch hero_flame.cmp.tst.001.mov