Custom fireball surface shaders were written in the RenderMan Shading Language. The shaders were used to create two animations. The first animation is intended to show what can be achieved using a single sphere. The second animation conbines the use of the fireball shader with a displacement shader created using SLIM. Both animations were made using Maya.
I encountered alot of difficulty in the project. My displacement shaders worked really well on the single NURBS sphere used for the fireball by itself. However, when I went to work on the particles and my actual fireball scene, no displacement worked. The NURBS movie is actually 3 NURBS spheres, with the three shaders used on it (shown in the graphics, below). I couldn't animate the particles to achieve that effect, so I tried using 2 emitters, one for each "corridor", and then duplicating each, using the different shaders. I assumed, wrongly, that the particle systems would follow the same exact path. They did not. I don't like screaming, but I did alot of it, then. So, I modified one shader for each particle system, and the result is the movie you see at the very top of the page. Here is my SLIM shader, palette, and scene info. I'm going to sleep now. Enjoy!
