Chapter 12: Special Effects with EEVEE – Fire and Smoke

In Chapter 2, Creating Materials Fast with EEVEE, we created an animated material that involved smoke. In this chapter, we're going to spend time creating a physical simulation of fire and then compositing it into our spaceship scene. The fire we make is part of the physics simulation suite that comes built into Blender. Physics simulations can cover anything, from fluid to smoke to dropping objects and having them shatter. The workflow for physics simulations is a little different than other workflows in Blender. First, the simulation is created using the parameters that we input, but we don't get to directly create the fire like we would when modeling. We can add or subtract forces from the simulation, change gravity, and add effects, but ultimately it's the computer that calculates each frame for us and then caches it so that we can play it again. This leads to more experimentation when creating physics...