Animation with fire

# 1 07-10-2002 , 05:58 AM

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I've been trying to animate fire, but can only seem to get still images of it with the regular rendering stuff. As most of you know, when you take an object and apply fire effects to it, you get green spheres when you play the animation. I want to see the actual fire in motion. PlayBlast, hardware Rendering, and Batch Render are incapable of completing this task. As said before, I can only see the fire if I render a still shot.

SO, if maya is not capable at all of completing this task, can I buy some program to play my animations? What are the best products out there? Thanks.

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# 2 07-10-2002 , 01:34 PM

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batch rendering should be fine, as it renders multiple still frames in a sequance... check your render globals and make sure you have the settings you need...

-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

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# 3 07-10-2002 , 02:25 PM

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Batch Rendering only gives me a still shot. I checked the globals and everythings fine. It sends the "firetest" file into the images section. I always am forced to import them, though. No biggy there really. I'm rendering 50 frames and it processes it all within about 3 seconds. That seems a little fast to me, so I'm not sure everything is right. Anyway, if I do open "firetest" by importing it, I get a small window with the fire. Apparently, you are supposed to be able to play the animation by pressing Alt, but that only makes the window flicker and then a square box mysteriously appears, which blocks my view a little.

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# 4 07-10-2002 , 02:53 PM

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50 frames in 3 seconds does seem quite fast. Do you have 50 files in your images folder? What kind of files are you outputting? When I usually play my animation, I open the first file in Fcheck, and then go to File > Open Animation and again select the first image. It then plays all of them in sequance.

Not sure what the problem may be for you.

-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

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# 5 07-10-2002 , 03:57 PM

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Ug. The only thing that appears in the image folder is "firetest" which has a camera icon beside it. If I do a hardware render, I get 50 images in the image file. Only problem with that is that it doesn't display the fire. Anyway, when I click the "firetest" file in the image file, I get an image of the fire. I can hold Alt and = and that plays the animation iff I hold it down the whole time. I can't go backwards in the animation and I can't go back to the first frame.

The only thing I can think of is that I'm supposed to have something different in the globals window under "File name prefix." As of now, it says "{not set; using filename} At the very top of the window it says where it will direct the files, which is the image section of Maya in C:/

I'm thinking it might be easier to just buy a seperate program to render the scene because for starters, I don't like the small window the batch renderer provides and the resolution is terrible from the still shot I see.

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# 6 07-10-2002 , 05:57 PM

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you can adjust all that stuff... Maya's renderer is actually quite good, but it takes some practice to get nice results. I'm not sure what might be the problem, but I don't think you really need to buy a seperate program... but whatever floats your boat. user added image

-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

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# 7 07-10-2002 , 10:04 PM

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Wahoo! I finally figured out how to do it!
1. open Render Globals
2. type in something for File Name Prefix
3. change By Frame to a number one more than the number of digits in your last frame. (e.i. - animation is 100 frames, there are 3 digits in the number "100", therefore, By Frame should be set to 4.)
4. change image format to Targa.
5. Close Render Globals.
6. Open PlayBlast. (PlayBlast will instantly begin to buffer the animation. Stop it from doing so by pressing Esc.)
7. Select File>Open Animation.
8. Find and Select the first frame in the animation.
9. Choose Open.

And wala! PlayBlast renders the scene with all my beautiful fire flickering about.

Thanks to Tom from the Alias|Wavefront forum.

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