Laser Welding Project

# 1 03-11-2005 , 05:57 PM

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Hey all, I'm working on a project for class, and I've decided to get really creative. I'm designing a short animation to emulate some of the proccessing capabilities of a steel company. I have the stmaping and deformation part down, but I'm having some trouble getting the welding part down.

What I would like to do is have a blue laser trace the outline of a cut out and have the contact surface emitting smoke, sparks, and a little flame, all the while having a really bright point light flickering along with the effects. So far I have the light under control, and I dont think animating the whole scene will be very difficult, however I am having trouble getting the smoke and fire effects to render out convincingly. Is there anyone experienced enough with these effects to help me out? Thanks all.

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# 2 03-11-2005 , 06:09 PM

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Hmmm. Sounds to me like you need some particle emitter(s) and depending on how real it needs to look, I'd use a fluid simulation to do the smoke. The particles STREAKS should be pretty straight forward. You could set up a ramp to control the color. You could randomize the particle life span and emittion rate. Use gravity and collisions too. The emitter(s) could be keyframed so they will follow the path of the laser or you could set up a path using a curve then have the emitter(s) follow it. Depending on how you created the laser, you may already have something on the surface of the object being cut that you could constrain the emitter(s) to.

I know this info sounds general but it's all I can come up with without actually doing it.

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# 3 03-11-2005 , 06:16 PM

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Thanks, I was pretty much thinking the same things. Although I just started over and now the smoke wont render out when I try to render a single frame. I get a message in the lower right stating: "Warning: Hardware rendering selected for Smoke_ParticleShape. Skipped." Does anyone know how i can fix that? Thanks all.

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# 4 03-11-2005 , 06:51 PM

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For particles, you have to hardware render unless you're using certain kinds of partices like blobby surface and 1 or 2 others.

You got that message because you have to render the particles as a seperate pass using Maya's hardware renderer then composite them in another program such as After Effects.

Last edited by Velusion; 03-11-2005 at 06:58 PM.

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# 5 03-11-2005 , 08:03 PM

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So after I am finished, I will have to render out 2 animations and use after affects to merge the two?

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# 6 04-11-2005 , 02:23 PM

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yes.

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# 7 05-11-2005 , 01:39 PM

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or you could use any other composing software, you dont need to stick to after effects

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# 8 05-11-2005 , 06:28 PM

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Yes. That's right. Any compositing program will do.

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# 9 09-11-2005 , 08:39 PM

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I've been rendering out screens of the animation to see how it looks, but the particles i have (sparks) saw that hardware rendering is selected for the particles, is there anyway to change it to software rendering? Thanks.

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# 10 09-11-2005 , 09:01 PM

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Yes. In the render globals.

or wait; do you mean you want the renderer to first do a hardware render of the partlcles then automatically switch to a software render for the non-particle objects? If so, I don't know if you can do that.

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# 11 09-11-2005 , 10:00 PM

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When I do a software render, it says "Warning: Particles set to hardware render" or something along those lines implying that you can choose which render mode the particles will be rendered in. I was wondering how I could change it so that the particles would be rendered in the software render as well.

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