Wondering about Fire2012 tweaking. I saw the demo videos for fire2012 of a strip covered with white split loom, and it looked totally realistic like there was real fire behind there in the video. But running Fire2012 on my 144 APA102 strip IRL it just doesn’t look like real fire at all. I’m wondering what to do to make it look more like real fire. I’ll start with adjusting the parameters for motion; it sounds like the defaults were for about a 60 led strip. I will probably only want each fireball to use about 60 leds out of the ~700 leds in the final LED circle.
I think the linearity is one big reason this doesn’t look like fire; the narrow strip doesn’t show the blooming effect often seen in videos where the light grows wider than the strip like a strip on fire would.
For practical reasons I don’t want to go wider than about an inch of diffusion over the LED strip otherwise I would widen to diffuse a lot more. I’m using packing foam as my diffuser, about 1/2" deep by 3/4 to 1 inch wide.
One area that I think might bear some fruit is to work on the colors; in particular the red/orange colors of the strips I have just don’t look the same as fire; too pink or neon looking. I haven’t tried messing with gamma or look up tables yet.