Ok, I need some help here from those of you who have a bit more experience. What I'm trying to do is take one of the flame materials and animate it on a sphere so that it dies out and leaves nothing but smoke behind. Sounds simple enough, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to do it. The manual, unfortunately, isn't much help to me on this as I'm not sure what type of preset to use, which axis to animate, etc. Also not sure how to change from one material (fire) to another (smoke) without just rendering each frame by hand and combining them in an outside program. Help?? Kate the Konfused

Hi Kate, It would take to much time and space to explain you how to do what you want. I think you go to quick and have not understoud yet how the animation system in Vue works. The best you can do is to follow the animation tutorials in the user guide before you try to create your own animations. Once you understand how it works, you will do a better job. You have not to render each frame, nor make changes by hand on each image. Vue does this for you automatically. Try some easy things first. Regards, Guitta

heya; first of all, if you have a fire material and a smoke material, you mix them. at the start of the animation, you set the slider to all material #1 (fire), and at the end, set it to all #2 (smoke). see the frog-to-stone tutorial. now, as to making the flames wiggle and sputter and do flame-like things.... er... experiment? :) i think you want to mess with the turbulence of the orange-to-yellow gradient mix function. just set it at one value at the start and another value at the end and see what that does.

Thanks, I'll give that a shot and see if it works, Bloodsong. Kate

heya; i hope we get to see the results when you're done. :)

Well, if I can get it to work properly, I'll put the animated material up on the free stuff. So far I'm getting a passable result with an animated material on a sphere and a column, then I animate the two of them to make the fire and smoke rise and fall. I think if I can get the sunlight/ambient light to flicker properly I can simulate the flickering of the flames. Still experimenting, but I think I'm close now... Kate the Mad Scientist