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clone of particle emitter layer invisible
Hi. Doing a project where a character catches on fire, then runs around comically while on fire, as people are often wont to do in real life.
The way I did this is pretty crude, made a group with the fire particle emitter and the character, then keyframe character (he’s animated) around, figuring fire will move with him. Wrong. I guess ’cause it’s a particle emitter (I am not super experienced with Motion), the particles kind of trail instead of the fire staying “intact” as he moves (he moves really fast). Problem is, it trails so bad that he doesn’t even look like he’s burning ’til he stops moving, the fire doesn’t “keep up”, it’s too slow. Make sense?
Read in another thread that someone was having a similar issue with particle spread due to animation/motion of the emitter along a path, and you guys recommended cloning the emitter layer and animating that. So I tried this, and for some reason, my cloned emitter is invisible.
I am doing some crazy 3D stuff in this project so maybe there’s something I don’t understand about how all that interacts. I’ve tried getting it to focus on that object in 3D space so I can see where it is but every view of it just shows the white box that denotes that layer size, the layer content itself is just invisible.
Ideas?
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8 Replies
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If your character is moving really fast you will just need to increase the birth rate of your particles a lot so that the fire can keep up – and probably also reduce their life.
Increasing at Attach to Emitter value can also help to keep the particles more firmly attached to the movement.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Ah. Interesting. I will try that. My other very cheesy idea, that i know will work, is to simply let the fire go for a while, static, and export that as a transparent bg movie, then import the movie and use that in place if the emitter.
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There could be a number of reasons why the clone is not showing up. Without seeing a screenshot of your project, or seeing the project itself, it’s difficult to tell what could be the problem.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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What aspect of the project would you like screenshots of? There are two many layers to fit them all in one screencap (which is probably not helping the issue).
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You can make the layers smaller in the layers pane by grabbing the edge of a layer and dragging up. And I don’t really need to see every layer in your project, just ones that might be affecting the clones opacity, or blocking it from view. Basically making sure that you don’t have 2d/3d layer issues, or layer order issues. If the problem isn’t easily viewable, I’d need to see the actual project to tell what your problem is.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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You’ve probably solved this already but just in case – here’s a test that shows that the suggestions I gave you will work to lock your particles to your character however fast he moves.
The key things are:
reduce the life of the particles right down to almost nothing (0.05 in this case);
increase the birth rate quite a lot (400);
and make sure you increase the Attach to Emitter from zero (anything above zero will work for some reason I don’t understand).
Another thing that’s worth adjusting is the Opacity Over Life making sure your particles fade in and fade out quite quickly, especially if you can’t get the life value low enough.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Yes, sorry, I didn’t mean to abandon the thread. I will take a look at the link but I took the suggestions by the poster who mentioned “attach to emitter” the first time and played with those settings. That seemed to do it. My experience, contrary to yours, was the attach to emitter percentage had to be pretty high for it to move correctly. Too little and I would get a tiny fire trail that moved with him instead of the huge flame I had when the character was static.
As far as life, I want to keep that high so the fire is “tall”, don’t I?
At any rate, issue is solved for now. I still don’t know what the clone issue is ’cause I cloned other things successfully in the same project.
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[Josh Bass] “I took the suggestions by the poster who mentioned “attach to emitter” the first time and played with those settings. “
Glad to hear you got my suggestion to work.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com
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