Anyone seen or made such a thing? The vanilla fire NIF(s) look terrible if viewed from above.

One bump

Not terrible but indeed FLAT!
The only flame effects I have added have used a rotating billboard animation like that of the torch.nif
Sorry I cannot be more help.

If you want to get away from a billboard with an animated texture, which obviously assumes you're on the same level as the flame, then the only option may be a particle effect, rather than a different mesh replacing the plane. You always have the problem that the flame needs to travel up-gravity rather than along the "surface", so a fully 3-d solution is the only one that's going to look right.

I'd love to see this go somewhere if a modeller chooses to take it on. Currently UV's explosives use a dynamically scaled flame mesh and it does look pretty rubbish because it's essentially flat. It's not around for long enough for it to be too much of a problem, but I'd much rather have a full 3d effect to work with.

Do we have an emiiter NIF for fire? I'd like to try it out if you can point me in the right direction. I'm not impressed by most particle based fires as they look like 'flaming dust'.

I was thinking of animated texture over a morphed animation.