Fire simulation

Hi,

May be a dumb question but search yielded no relevant results. Hence posting this. Is it possible to capture fire using depthkit?

Thanks,
Avinash

1 Like

Thanks for posting, Avinash. I’d love to see how this would look!

Hi Avinash,

This is such a great question. The disappointing truth is you will have trouble capturing fire with Depthkit in a way that appears like fire in real life.

Here’s why:

Depthkit uses sensor like Kinect and RealSense to acquire 3D information of physical objects. These sensors cast infrared light into the scene that is invisible to the naked eye, but can be detected by the cameras. When the cameras on the sensors see the pattern of their own emitted lights on a surface, they are able to discern the distance to that surface. This requires the these light patterns to show up clearly on a solid surface or object. Which unfortunately is not the case when shooting things like transparent glass, fire, smoke, water or haze.

I encourage you to try it anyway- Depending on what you are burning, you may see interesting effects when the video texture of the fire then mapped onto the 3D capture of the object underneath. The results may be surprising!

I always like to say if you know what it’s going to look like before you do it, it’s not worth doing. If you do try, please report your results back here for us to discuss.