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You can do lightning with particles, there’s a preset in one of the libraries. Or there’s one for sparks or something like that.
Have you tried the normal flame timewarp, or the newer motion estimation one in Batch? I should think they’d work pretty well on fire, if it’s all soft rather than sparky.
That sounds like a recipe for disaster. If the new disks are even slightly different, the old cards might not drive them properly. Might look like they work, but could cause you weird problems down the line… if they’re the exact same revision I suppose this is okay, but… your’re a braver man than me 😯
You should check what revision of frontplane, power supply and IP30 board you have, but if you’ve got the newest, and that’s not rare, you can go to dual 600, V12 and 8 gig, which would make it an Octane2.
Check http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/mfinbow/octane/upgrading.html.
I think that stuff (“…a new set of DSOÂ’s, OpenML libraries, a DMediaPro (xtdigvid) driver, VBOB firmware, and some Autodesk-certified patches for IRIX 6.5.23f…”) is in the Packages and Patches folders on the discreet CD but give the tech support people a call if you can’t find it.
It’s not on any of the 20 CDs I’ve copied to HD over the years… installing IRIX from CDs is such a pain the arse 🙂
You should have a seperate CD, Digital Video Option x.x, there’s also updates for that in the unbundled folder inside the dist folder on IRIX Overlay CD 2, of all places. I think they’re for that anyway… slightly confusing naming scheme SGI use… there’s an old version here, maybe new enough to get updated by the overlay?
XTHD I have no idea, but there’s a version here.
Yep, if you wanted someone else to be able to see a clip you’d have to publish it, export it or get them to grab it from your Stone with Wire/Wiretap.
Maybe one day we’ll see a Flame which can run without a Stone, using purely Soft clips for cache, scratch, input and output but that day is not today 🙂 You work on the Stone and give things to other people as they’re done.
CXFS is so expensive and complicated that you’d have to talk to SGI about your needs and get a “solution” from them, but there’s no particular piece of CXFS hardware, you just need loadsa Fibre Channel infrastructure and a machine with gobs of RAM to look after the metadata. Obviously they’ll try and sell you their own arrays and machines, and for such a mission-critical thing it might be best to stick with what’s known to work 🙂
Some more info in this thread and probably others.
It works by extreme cleverness… think one great big disk array with multiple computers of all platforms connected to it. CXFS lets you have a single filesystem on the array and have all machines access it at once, using one master machine (the metadata server) to keep track of who on earth is doing what and to which files. So you could have an Avid and a Final Cut suite connected to it, and both could be accessing the same media files at once, say two editors cutting the same footage into two different deliverables or something.
However. All the usual rules about sharing files on a single machine apply – if Final Cut is writing to a Quicktime, you can’t open it from an Avid machine at the same time and have it update magically or anything.
And it’s not that useful for Flame/Smoke, because the storage appears as a filesystem, not a Stone. So you can’t have Final Cut use footage that you’ve just comped in Flame without exporting/publishing or whatever. I guess you could work with soft-imported image sequences and have them update on the fly as they’re changed by other users. And maybe with Wiretap other things will start to use Stones, but right now it seems to me that CXFS (and similar things) are only useful for keeping everything in one place and avoiding having to transfer material between filesystems. It’s not going to let you collaborate between Final Cut and Avid as tightly as you could between say Flame and Smoke with Stone Shared.
Basically CXFS is like keeping everything on one Samba or NFS share and everything using that, except about a BAJILLION times faster.
So why is vertical motion okay, or at least less of a problem? Rolling credits always seem fine on film…
Why does this happen?
Do the projection with hard edges, render the soft shapes as white on black and multiply the two? Projection is just clever texturing, I don’t think you can do what you want in a single step…
If you use an OpenGL viewport and use a view other than Camera you can see everything, as I recall, including what’s outside the view frustrum.
This might help with your matte painting, or is that what you’re already doing?
What you do is use the optical ADAT output on the Octane2 with a rackmount ADAT to analogue convertor, a Lucid something or other. This gives you balanced outs. For sync you supply an AES signal to the Octane2. It all gets a bit complicated if you also want remote control of the Lucid… take a peek at the flame installation guide if you want the full gory details, I think you should be able to get it on the website somewhere.
Not the video card, no, the Octane2 needs a whole new series of video cards. If you have one of those old weirdo Sonic audio setups I guess you could, but they’re a bit old-school now, you can just use the Octane2’s built in audio. Since you’re going to have licence troubles anyway, best just talk to the friendly lady at Discreet, sorry Autodesk 🙂
Amen to the graph zooming – I also get tangent handles disappearing off the top and bottom now and then. The graph just isn’t big enough either.
Most annoying thing for me is the way that zooming always goes into the centre of the image. Say you’ve panned over to one side to do some fine roto, you zoom out to see everything, zoom back in and you’re in the wrong place! Grrr!
What else… oh yeah, the GUI takes up far, far too much space at the bottom of the screen on a widescreen monitor.
Pretty thick that the toolbar and the workspace tree are in one tab group… they’re the two most important things but they can’t be viewed at the same time unless you put one on another monitor.