Campfire, with volume

How volume is made

• Three cards, three different drawn poses. Different tongue count, different lean, different height. Never the same drawing at the same moment.
• Hard occlusion is the depth cue. Where the near silhouette crosses the far one it cuts a crisp solid edge. That edge is the entire volume read.
• Not additive. Additive reveals every layer at once — no self-occlusion, no depth. Already measured as reading like a 90s intersecting billboard prop.
• Phase-offset by 2–3 poses. Same clock, different frame. Sharing a frame collapses the volume back into one repeated drawing.
• Edge-on cards fade out over the last ~20°. Otherwise an edge-on card draws a bright sliver and the fire reads as several flames.

Colour — flat bands, no gradients

Red is the edge, not the mass — that correction took three passes. Near-white is confined to a low flare at the base, nowhere else. The approved design has no dark outline — its dimmest lit pixel is rgb(254,128,47).

Timing — stepped, never smoothed

• 12 fps of distinct drawn poses. Hand-drawn fire animates on twos and threes. The steps are the style.
• Cycle 0.83–1.0s. Derived from plume frequency for a 1 m flame, not chosen.
• Light flickers 4–8 Hz on a shared gain. Faster than the shape, so the body surges as one.
• Never ease over an already-eased drawing. The drawn curve is the timing curve.

• The rounded slab. A filled primitive with a noise-carved skin. This is what the raymarched fire actually rendered — measured, not guessed.
• A rigid outline with detail moving inside it. A frozen silhouette with churn behind it. Measured symptom: silhouette width identical across six frames while internal pixels changed 44.6%.
• A flat frontal sticker. One card, front-only. Three cards showing one drawing is the same failure with more overdraw.
• The photoreal Houdini look. Soft continuous fluid, smoke plumes, glow halos. Wrong register.
• A yellow flame. Large saturated yellow blooms into a white blob under the pre-tone-map threshold.