A fire character is possible with fluids.
I was creating a character out of smoke and one of my tests that I did, he ended up looking like he was on fire.
I encased him in a container. I used a proxy object - low polygon single mesh as my emitter that was skinned to the character rig.
Dynamic Sim
I turned off collisions with geometry. I used a little damping... 0.050.
Contents
Density
Increased buoyancy to just under 2 with dissipation set around 3.
velocity
Reduce the velocity scale to match the scene - smaller than default and crank the swirl ~30-40.
Turbo
Turbulence should be 1 and speed 5, the frequencey was an expression that was 2 +/- 1.5. So that the frequency is between 0.5 and 4. It needs to be changing so that the turbulence isn't static.
Shading
Low transparency. density grids on the color/incandescence/opacity. Ramps were all on the left side.
Color = black/white/black colors, placed 0.03/0.04/0.7
Incan = black/lightblue/black colors, placed 0/0.02/0.1 - here you would use 3 colors in place of the lightblue - BRIGHT yellow - value = 2, orange then red.
Opacity is very tricky. - A small bump on the left side of the grid.
Here are my points: v = value p = position -> v0p0 v.04p.1603 v.014p.46 v0p1
I changed the bias to 0.513
You should then have a flaming character.
Have fun and tweak the numbers one at a time.
Chris