Good-looking fire often looks much more complicated than it really is.
For this flamethrower turret, developer Loop_Box did not build a new shader from scratch. They reused a stylized smoke shader they had made earlier in Godot and just adjusted a few parameters to make it behave like fire.
The effect starts by scrolling a Voronoi noise texture across the particle mesh. As the UVs move, the flame keeps changing shape without needing different meshes or animations.
As the particle changes, the visible part of the mesh gets smaller. Loop_Box uses the particle's lifetime as the alpha cutoff.
The particle also changes color over time. A gradient texture controls the transition from almost white to orange and finally red.
The smoke effect uses the same shader. The main differences are a longer particle lifetime and a different color gradient that goes from red to black.
According to Loop_Box, that is the whole trick. The flamethrower reuses the same shader with a few tweaked parameters.
If you want to learn more, the links will be right below.
- Smoke shader: https://github.com/Loop-Box/Stylized-Smoke-For-Godot4.5
- Twitter / X: https://x.com/Loob_Box
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loop_box_the
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