Fireplace Configurator Scripting

[joelly3d]

I am working on a job and have 150 configurable fireplaces. The "Bed" type is rocks beads, or logs. All of these have different fires. i noticed i can't script the visibility of the different Phoenix nodes with my scene controller. Is there a better way to script this so that it works with a Custom Attribute like this?



I just wanted to make it so i could configure everything with one node. Currently i have layers i just have to swap out, but with so many options, and renders taking 8 hours each, a mistake is more likely and costly time wise.. Scripting would nail it down.


Curious if anyone has any suggestions.


Thought, if i made a Dummy, and parented everything in a layer to a dummy, then had the script scale the dummy to 0, would it still calculate at render time? If not, that could be a solution.

[zdravko_pavlov1]

Hey,

Assuming that you are using 3ds max (by the looks of it). And are you saying that you have all of the simulators inside a single scene? Isn't it possible to set all of the simulator's Renderable state to be controlled By Layer?

You mentioned layers so it might be possible to switch it on and off with your script.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zEf...ew?usp=sharing

[zdravko_pavlov1]

You might be able to use the scene state manager in 3ds max as well.
https://gyazo.com/982ff1d4966af3169c4070c25a507ebb

But i think I start to understand your problem. The scene states are not animatable and maybe you can't control it with your script. The renderable checkbox also doesn't appear to be animatable. Am I getting this right?
And also the visibility parameter doesn't work with volumetric rendering. It works fine if you render your fire as geometry: https://gyazo.com/7ca2466171ef6f1283812d46c6dadfd8 But once the volumetric render kicks in, it doesn't respect the visibility value.

I tried making a custom attribute holder that switches the playback mode in Cache Index mode and setting the cache to frame 0 (I simulated from frame 1 so frame 0 is empty).
https://gyazo.com/aafd8728ae94d1387eebef35fe8e9ee9
This is a workaround and might not be ideal, but might give you some ideas.

[joelly3d]

I found a solution! I will post it after i do a write up.

[joelly3d]

Here's the write up explaining my work around. It also has a simple scene attached to show how it works.

https://www.biglittlepictures.com/sc...-3d-studio-max