am creating a close up of a star, and zoom out showing a star field.....

for these stars i use a optical FX

me is pretty pretty new to expressions

but trying to do a randow flickering on the star through the use of animated glow noise and other animated attributes on the optical fx

because the star will be like 5 minutes in vision in my scene, and many other stars will become visible, i am looking for an expression that changes (fading) the values of the atributes random over lets say 10 frames, and when possible over a random amount of frames aswell

if i use the rand(), maya recalculates a new value every frame so the flickering is way to fast.....

my goal for the stars is, to have a random value that changes gradualy over 10 frames towards the next random value...and then again over 10 frames smoothly to a new random value

in a sense making the random values flow from one, into the other........

i was playing with a linstep value

but this only fades in to 0.8

opticalFX1.glowSpread = hermite(<<0,0.1,0>>,<<0,0.8,0>>,
<<0,0,0>>, <<0,0,0>>, smoothstep(0,1,time));

if i then fill in a rand() command for the 0.1 and the 0.8 value it again changes every frame....

just saw 2 other posts on this forum about a smooth rotation of the tips of an airplane, and something about a flickering light.....

i tried combining them but my understanding of MEL is not strong enough.....


anyone any tips for me....???

thank you.....