Hi Olby. Additive blending does work pretty well for fire, but you get different levels of intensity depending on the background. e.g. if it's over a pitch black background, it'll be the brightness of the image. If it's over a full white background, it'll be full white and the flame will be invisible. At least, that's how I remember ghosting working. Plus, if there is a smoke element to the animation/flame, then that may need to be darker than the blackground, but you'll always get a very light grey.
With an alpha channel, you can display it with a consistent brightness for all background surfaces. If you want the super brightness that additive blending provides, you can use a shader or probably other commands like the fade object command.
As it turns out, Particle Illusion 3 has a trial which I'm currently playing around with. Good effects!
It outputs the images with alpha which is great. Only problem is, I have to copy and paste 64 individual images into a larger texture map.
Bring on approximately and hour of copy, click, paste, repeat.
I almost started writing a DBP program to create texture atlases for individual files, but then realised you can't save with transparency in a format I can open (DDS probably saves the alpha but I can't open them). So canned that idea!
Here's an export from PE. There was a built in campfire preset which I just tweaked a lot. It doesn't export looped animations, so I'll have to do that myself.
