Fire options

Use these options to set the behavior and appearance of your fire effect.

Object On Fire

Name of the object to which the Fire effect will be applied. Omit this entry if you’ve selected an object in the workspace.

Fire Particle Name

Name of the emitted particle object. If you provide no name, Maya uses a default name.

Fire Emitter Type

Click the pull-down menu to select Surface, Omni-directional Point, Directional Point, or Curve emission. You cannot change this option after creation.

To emit from CVs, vertices, edit points, particles, or a position not associated with an object, you must select Omni-directional Point or Directional Point. You can select Surface only for NURBS or polygonal surfaces. You can select Curve only for NURBS curves. See Edit emitter attributes using workspace manipulators for more details.

Fire Density

Sets how much flame appears in relation to transparent space. This affects the brightness of the flames.

Flame Start and End Radius

The Fire effect displays emitted particles as the Cloud particle render type. These attributes set how large the radius of each particle cloud is at the start and end of its lifespan. This controls the size of the flame and how the size diminishes during its lifetime.

Fire Intensity

Sets the brightness of the fire.

Fire Spread

Sets the emission spread angle. This angle defines a conical region where the particles are emitted randomly. You can enter a value between 0 and 1. A value of 1 means 180 degrees. Valid for Directional Point and Curve emitters only.

Fire Speed

Sets how quickly the flames move.

Fire Direction X, Y, Z

Sets the direction the flames move. It also controls the direction of the directional point emitter.

Fire Turbulence

Sets how much the flame speed and direction are perturbed.

Fire Scale

Scales the Fire Density, Flame Start and End Radius, Fire Speed, Fire Turbulence, and Fire Lifespan.

Fire Lifespan

Sets how many seconds each emitted fire particle lives. Available in the Attribute Editor only (with emitted particle object selected).

Additional tips

You can alter the fire’s appearance by tuning the values of the following attributes of the emitted particle object.

lifespanPP

Controls the per particle lifespan. A creation expression controls this attribute. To edit the expression, select the emitted particles, right-click the lifespanPP attribute box in the Attribute Editor’s Per Particle (Array) Attributes section, then select Creation Expression.

radiusPP

Sets the radius of the particle cloud from birth to death using a ramp. To edit the ramp, select the emitted particles, right-click the radiusPP attribute box in the Attribute Editor’s Per Particle (Array) Attributes section, then select arrayMapper1.outValuePP > Edit Ramp.