CompuServe Thread

Gary, Glad you liked the fire. It must have cost you a couple of dollars to download. Sorry, but it needed that many frames to loop and not look too repetitious. I created it by building a representative campfire in my Weber grill. There's no open burning in my subdivision. <g> Then at night, with no lights or obstructions in the background, just basic black, I used a tripod to get my consumer camera about level with the flame. I then ran video through to my EVO9650, which was previously formatted with time code. I then taped about 15 minutes of what I considered to be a pretty good representation of a campfire. After reviewing, I found 2 seconds (60 frames) which looked about the best, and using Action Animator and my DQ422 Controller, I digitized those 60 frames into 3DStudio, where I scaled the final output to be 160 x 120, and saved as a FLC file. (I probably would have been happier if I could have used a good professional level camera which would have done a better job of catching the subtle differences in color of the flame. My camera got somewhat bleached out on the highlights.) So saving as an 8 bit flc file was no major handicap. I then created an orange self-illuminated material with the flc as an opacity map and applied that to a flat plane which I placed in about the appropriate location in between the two logs in the fireplace. I created 4 spotlights, 3 of which I faced toward the back of the fireplace with the luminence level of each varying over time. That's about it. Again, if someone was to use a better camera, you could probably capture the colors of the flame a little better, but this worked for my purposes. If you're interested in the rotoscoped opacity flc, I could upload it. Roger D.