Fire at your fingertips

One of the best bits in superhero movies such as Hellboy and the X-Men series is where a character has the ability to cause fire to spew forth from their hands before hurling an almighty flaming ball at their nemeses. It’s certainly a handy superpower, and we can only hope that these people are sensible enough to ask someone else to fill their car up at the petrol station. In this tutorial, we’ll show you the safe way to recreate this fantastic ‘pyrokinetic’ effect.

Helping us with the drama is a lovely mademoiselle, who has gleefully posed for a brief video clip, running down a deserted corridor and screeching to a halt before summoning up her dark powers and throwing a powerful blue thunderbolt – presumably at someone who’s stolen her jar of Nutella. [Pardon? – Ed.]

The visual effects, of course, step in where our heroine’s powers end: creating the fireball and the wisps of blue flame that spring from her palms as her power builds. We’ll use LightWave 3D to track a 3D model of a hand into the scene, which will then serve as an emitter for particles that will lap around the hand and spiral upwards. Volume HyperVoxels will enable us to render the particles as an ethereal blue flame, and we’ll use After Effects to composite the render back into the background footage, enhancing it a little to fit the scene better.

Most of the actual work will be done with LightWave’s particle tool, ParticleFX, and since we’ll be using collisions, calculating the simulation will probably be quite slow and somewhat unstable. For this reason, we strongly suggest saving the scene as my_scene_v001.lws and using the Incremental Save feature to save a new version every few minutes.

Click here to download the support files (~128MB)