Cartoon Fire shader?

somerandomguy1

Hey everyone! I've hit a dead end on my research into this so i'm reaching out to see if maybe someone can help. I'm trying to recreate this effect in Shader Forge in Unity. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgLpyRVbJUE

I'm working on a game that has a very painted/ stylized art and this fits way more than a realistic flame. 

What I have so far. 
1. I'm working in shader forge but if you know how to do it in regular code that's fine I can take a crack at it. I have found a shader for a cell shading system but I can't find a good example of using it in a particle system because at the moment if I apply it to my flame particle that I have set up it doesn't accept color information from the particle system and I don't want to just put a one color node onto it I want a transition from blue to orange to yellow if possible. 
2. My flame particle is set up pretty well for a base. It has a size limit of time, rotator, color over lifetime and i've limited the velocity a bit. 

Thanks in advance for help and wisdom. 

Eric Chadwick

It's cool they show the bitmaps used in the effect.

I think I also see a UV distortion effect in there, the one they are changing with the Speed shader parameter. And there's a camera post process for the bloom/glows.

I've been doing a lot of UV distortion stuff lately. I shared some screenshots of my node setups in my sketchbook thread, might help you.
http://polycount.com/discussion/160691/sketchbook-eric-chadwick

somerandomguy1

Eric Chadwick said:

It's cool they show the bitmaps used in the effect.

I think I also see a UV distortion effect in there, the one they are changing with the Speed shader parameter. And there's a camera post process for the bloom/glows.

I've been doing a lot of UV distortion stuff lately. I shared some screenshots of my node setups in my sketchbook thread, might help you.
http://polycount.com/discussion/160691/sketchbook-eric-chadwick

Sweet ty i'll follow through that and see. I also recently got some advice from another user on Unity Reddit that they got similar effects by spawning simplified meshs of flame shapes from a particle system. I'm following that as well to see which ends up being the best effect but I bet if I end up combining them in the future it will look how the video is. 

Eric Chadwick

With meshes you won't get that blobby look unless you feed some animation into the Vertex Offset.

But even then you'll end up with harder edges than if you use a bitmap on a plane, both because it's a 3d surface but also because you'll likely not have anti-aliasing.

Depends on the effect you want I guess. See the foliage shader in my thread, that has both uv distortion animation and vertex offset animation, both driven by a scrolling normal map. I used the uv distortion for smaller waves of motion so the leaves move around. And I used vertex offset to get the larger silhouette to change, since my meshes are seen from oblique angles sometimes.

somerandomguy1

Eric Chadwick said:

With meshes you won't get that blobby look unless you feed some animation into the Vertex Offset.

But even then you'll end up with harder edges than if you use a bitmap on a plane, both because it's a 3d surface but also because you'll likely not have anti-aliasing.

Depends on the effect you want I guess. See the foliage shader in my thread, that has both uv distortion animation and vertex offset animation, both driven by a scrolling normal map. I used the uv distortion for smaller waves of motion so the leaves move around. And I used vertex offset to get the larger silhouette to change, since my meshes are seen from oblique angles sometimes.

You're right that actually sounds closer to the first reference I posted which is what i'm going for. I'll try that out today since the other (meshes) way didn't work well ty!