Sardi Pax posts a look at using Blender’s dynamic Paint feature to drive and control volumetric effects, creating a volumetric fire animation limiting the parts of a surface that will emit the fire.

This tutorial covers how to use Dynamic paint to control volumetric fire

In this example, Sardi Pax creates a flame traveling on a plane that is the plane itself emitting the volumetric fire through a weight paint effect to control the areas of emission and the fire itself. Sadri notes that you will need to be in Blender Render mode, as the Cycles renderer does not render volumetric at the moment.