Ok.. it may be to stylistic for the realism we are shooting for.. but I thought it looked cool and it has a certain Tim Burton style to it.. which I like.

http://www.colins-loft.net/free/peffect/bu...K_Stream001.mov

opinions? I could see it or something like it all over Yoop's place... or even steam in KuKlip's shop? To me.. its definately more insteresting than just plain old smoke and steam.

C

I always wondered what your spiral-shaped particles would look like animated. Thumbs up! Now that's smoke with whimsy.

Of course, to really perfect this, you'd need three things:

1. The sprites themselves would have to be multi-frame animations. Ideally they'd start out as vertical squiggles, curl themselves up into a question mark, and then a vortex.
2. There would need to be some regular smoke mixed in with the spirals.
3. There would have to be more than one variation of the spiral particle image.

You can make out each individual sprite.....however, it does make for a kind of stylized smoke.....

Oddly.. they are. but its not showing for some reason. Basically its the spiral drawing and spiraling. I'll have to test it more. I agree with the rest as well. Its just a few minutes of playing that I put into it to see how it would go.

For it to really work.. We'd have to get the particle engine fixed (per my previous post) but NO ONE who could actually make those fixes seems to have had any input into that post so I doubt it will happen

cest la vi.. the particles will have to be what they are.

C

Oh! I went through a bug report by JohnL about how the sprites only play the first image of a sequence. It had lots of images of 1's to illustrate it.

In fact, I'm finding I can't import a sequence in any capacity. Perhaps you could test. Import a sequence and place it on a camera as an animated roto. Does the image change as you scrub the timeline?

I like the look of the spirals but it's too extraordinary to be regular steam or smoke. It would have to be associate with something magical like the Invisible Land or Yoop's castle, like you said.

Related to that bug report, I submitted an issue because I was applying an image sequence as a decal but the frame channel was not saved correctly. If I reanimated the decal's frame number each time I opened the project it would render correctly but by default only the first frame would be shown.

Ken, here's the report if you want to follow up with it. There's a project that goes along with it. Using numbered frames would illustrate better than my animated displacement map but it should still be apparrent.

http://hash.com/reports/view.php?id=2674

Whimsical smoke looks very cool. You should try different shapes as well as vary the sprite animations to see what other looks can be achieved.

Frank Silas