CompuServe Thread

#Help looping flames

4 messages in this thread
#185193From: Doug ProchnowAug 15, 1995 12:36 PM
"Looking for help in making flames loop (but not so as they appear to loop)." Looking for a trick way to make this happen and yet keep the animation to a reasonable frame count and have look naturally perpetual.I figured I could render out 100 frames or so and look for a close match to one of the first frames and have loop at that point, but I'm making alot of different fire animations and this would not be time efficient.Any ideas or techniques from anyone? One example of use I need is if I had a gas fireplace (inside a Macromedia Director interactive animation) and the fireplace is in the scene burning perpetually at a constant rate of flame.Then if and when the user wants to turn up the gas,the animation script would then jump to the same basic animation but now to the animation of the flame increasing to a bigger level and then again perpetually loop at that level until the next action. Any ideas appreciated, Doug
#185204From: Mike KelleyAug 15, 1995 1:35 PM
I think Gary's spoken to this issue before: something on the order of "if you want to loop Vapor or Flames cross fade it in Video Post." I think he was talking about using two animations and cross fading in the middle and then back to the beginning (using IFLs). I even think I tried this once (with a torch flame) and it worked just fine. The main reason for the cross fading (as opposed to simply using an IFL that went from 1-100-1) is to avoid the obvious "backup" look. But I could be remembering this all wrong (too little sleep last night).
#185220From: Doug ProchnowAug 15, 1995 3:18 PM
Thanks for reply.I'll try and search again for Gary's response to similiar request,now that i have a better idea what to search for on the "cross fade ..etc". Any other ideas from anyone would be greatly appreciated.
#185219From: MARTIN G FOSTERAug 15, 1995 3:14 PM
Doug, one thing that I've done and might be worth a try is to composite the fire sequence with itself, only one sequence is forward and one in reverse. Theoretically it should loop: fire 0-100 fire 100-0 fadein Just a thought.