There's an effect that I've been working on a fair bit lately, but no matter
what I seem to do, it never looks right. I figured that I'm probably not
going to get much further with it on my own (I've probably spent 50 hours
working on it now.... with basically no progress in the last 40) so I
thought I might see if anyone here has some useful suggestions as to how I
might proceed.

I've attatched a copy of the look I want for the effect (or more precisely
the look my friend wants, I'm doing this for him) I'm not sure if you're
supposed to post animations here that you didn't make yourself, but I'm not
sure where else to put it (it'd be too vague to describe it otherwise) Also,
this is my first time posting to these newgroups, so if this is a little out
of line, I apologize.

Now, I've manage to achieve most of the effect using media (the faint rising
stream of energy internally which you can't really see on such a poor
quality clip), however I can't get the outline to look anything near right,
more specifically, it's not spikey enough and I'm having a hard time getting
the little tufts of flame to seperate from the main body along the top, or
get a more jagged edge along the sides.

Now, I suspect that the outline for the origional effect was probably hand
drawn, with only the internal parts being done by computer, but nevertheless
there must be SOME way to achieve a fairly close approximation without being
able to draw (since I can't :-) )

I've tried dozens upon dozens of combinations of media with layered
densities with density maps, and nothing really achieves this effect. I
tried using sort of spiky meshes as the media container, but that actually
makes it look worse (the spiky bits look far too solid) I've perused a great
number of old threads in the newsgroups, but didn't find anything really
useful. So again I ask, can anyone help me here?

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Attachments:
Download 'flame.mpg' (250 KB)