3d fire rendering

half-life 2's fire looks cool - but it's just a well animated/drawn/alphablended billboards.

i think that the best way would be to do this and then to have some special system for when you look at it from above( or below ).

i dunno if you'll get a realtime and gpu firendlier version that will run on slightly older cards


ps - have you ever looked at fire from above in real life - damn but it's hot.

Yeah the volumetric explosion demo from nvidia isn't very good, if it's the one I'm thinking of. It crashes on every single machine I have run it on, so I have no idea what kind of magical machine it's supposed to run on, given that the demo is several years old. I've tried to run it on every Nvidia card I've owned, from TNT2, up to Geforce 2, to Geforce 4ti, to Geforce FX.

There's a fire technique listed in the book DirectX ShaderX, which uses a pixel shader to perturb texture coordinates, it can run on any GPU that supports pixel shader 1.4.

http://www.ati.com/developer/shaderx/ShaderX_TexturePerturbationEffects.pdf

I think there is a real-time fire rendering technique ("Gridless Controllable Fire")in Game Programming Gems 5, but I don't have the book handy to check if it is what you would be looking for. There is a brief sketch at http://i2lab.ucf.edu/Events/forum-may-2005/GPU-CFD-Poster.ppt, so if it looks like something you can use, I would suggest finding the book to get the full article.

The NVidia Vulcan fire demo is explained in the book GPU Gems.