WISP Fire Shader

July 11, 2020June 9, 2022 Tim Crellin 0 Comments Fire, Material, Shader, Smoke

The WISP Fire Shader has a unique approach to shading fire and smoke. This fire shader treats fire like gaseous vapor. Whereas other shaders miss the details of the density of the flame.

The problem with most other shaders is that your render time is wasted because you don’t even see the details of the fire. This is because other shaders use the flame factor to determine which part of the volume is emitting light.

How does the WISP Fire Shader work?

WISP takes your existing fire simulation and applies corrected shading to the volume, turning what used to be a bright gloopy mess, into a magnificent rolling fireball. It provides better depth perception, visual fidelity and animatable burn control with no extra simulation cost.
Simply select the target domain, apply the addon and hit render!

What does the workflow look like?

The workflow is super simple using the included WISP Fire Shader Addon as shown below. Alternatively the node groups can be manually appended if you don’t plan on installing the addon directly.

WISP fire shader available as an addon. — WISP fire shader is available as an addon in the new update.

What does the inside of the shader look like?

Volume Fresnel node from the Wisp Fire Shader — The core of the Wisp Fire Shader

Above you see the core of the Cycles shader; the Volume Fresnel Nodegroup. This converts the flames from blobs of solid light to a gaseous vapor. The parameters don’t need much explanation and you will learn faster what it does by playing with it than reading about it. And below the complete node setup.

Complete node setup of the shader — Complete node setup of the Wisp Fire Shader

Does this addon support EEVEE?

Yes! The node group for eevee is even simpler and which also speeds up the render time tremendously. There are a few drawbacks compared to the Cycles version, specifically the definition of edges, however this can usually be easily masked with some light motion blur.

What about in front of bright backgrounds?

Yes! This is where WISP excels. Most fire shaders struggle to look good in-front of anything other than a black background. Thanks to cutting edge shading techniques WISP manages to handle these edge cases without any problems. This makes it very suitable for daylight scenes or VFX where environment lighting is important. v1.2 refers to the previous version of WISP, and as you can see produces similar shading problems you will see with other shaders. v1.3 is the latest WISP version equipped with the new internal smoke feature, greatly enhancing visibility.

How does this Shader compare to other Fire Shaders?

Because I have two fire-shaders (paid products) claiming to be the best shaders, I decided to compare the shaders. Check the short video here below.

I’m new to Smoke Simulations, how can I test out this shader?

WISP comes with an updated example file containing a smoke simulation setup using the new Mantaflow fluid engine. All you need to do is hit bake, tweak the shader settings and you are ready to render!

Where to get the WISP Fire Shader?

You can get the shader on Blender Market.

Conclusion

Thatimster, the developer of the shader has a nice balance of marketing and quality of his products. When that is set well, I am willing to promote the products. So that looks all ok. (I write this with a reason).

Over to the shader: Indeed, this shader looks more realistic. I wrote earlier about the Blaze addon which is also handy when you look for a more stylized fire shader.

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