Fire Effect

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A friend challenged me to make a successful fire effect with only two texture maps. I used one flow map and one channel packed noise map. (The flow map has one last noise texture packed into the blue channel to complete the challenge on budget). The flow maps for the UV distortion were done in a 2D fluid simulation in Maya. If you look below, you can see that I remade a texture coordinate node from Unreal in Photoshop, painted that into a 2D fluid container, and let a turbulence field warp the UVs with higher fidelity than I would've achieved with a liquefy or smudge effect in Photoshop.

Besides the flow map, a few cloud noise and fractal noise maps are brought in from After Effects and channel packed in Photoshop. The shader got a little more instruction heavy to compensate for the loss of control in textures, but it let me make a pretty convincing fire effect on a very sexy, game ready budget.