I have something I want to try, but I cant figure out how to make it work. I want to make fog/smoke billowing into the camera. I want it to have high cotrast, lots of movement, and be able to alpha everything thats not smoke/fog. I am working on an expermental cg animation process in after effects and I would like to use carrara to generate the displacment maps. The problem was last week end I made a blimp and tried to recreate the hindenburg....the stupid thing rendered all weekend and when I got back on monday the fire never animated!!! I even hit shuffle!!! Do I have to hit suffle for every key frame?? Has anyone ever animated smoke/fire?

Interesting Idea. Yeah, I've tried it; I'm a sucker for cool FX. :) I've found it to be relatively straightforward. Insert Fog -> set slider to last keyframe, make completion 100%. It doesn't "billow". I don't remember if there is a wind function in Carrara, but I would definately look to MAX or LW for this.. :)

man!!! thats what it was...I didnt think to move the completion slide!!!! ARRGGG!! Did the alpha work or did you just key it?

Well, the fog is so translucent that I don't think that alphas would work anyway. It's possible, given enough density... I would just render ocer black, and when compositing, use something like "Add" or "multiply" to have JUST the fog appear. Hoborg

You might also do two passes -- one of the zeppelin, the other of the fog. Then you can composite them together in AE.... The fog could be rendered against black and composited with the lighten or screen transfer mode if the alpha doesn't work. As for the billowing effect, in RDS there's an animatable feature in fog objects for swirl, chaos, etc. I'd use these sliders (start at one value, end at another value) to see what kind of effects you can pull off.... And do low res test renders to save you the pain of rendering all weekend to find out something didn't work!