Urgent animation problem

[gardeler]

I'm trying to animate the values in phoenix in maya, and to my surprise, it doen't seem to be possible?? (Or am I totally missing something here?)

Here is my scenario:
I have a sim that I am pretty happy with, but the smoke is a little too thick compared to the previos shot. So I would like to make it a little more transperent in the beginning and then animate it back up over time. But I cannot find any controls to do it? there is no multiply on the smoke opacity like it is on fire, and it seems like the curves that control opacity cannot be animated??

What to do? Please help!

[Morbid Angel]

smoke factor is the opacity of the simple smoke, but if you are using smoke curve I suppose you could put a solid color texture into texture slot and animate the texture...But I haven't tried it.

[gardeler]

Thank you for the reply, I have used that before with varying results. I will give it a try to see what happens. Thank you for helping out!

[gardeler]

Did a quick test, and I think it could work. How ever it has a massive hit on rendertime. If I use a 100% white color, so the smoke is the same as before, it still takes twice as long to render... Not sure I can afford that amount of extra render time.

[Morbid Angel]

I see. Well try the following, create a key with value 0.1 at start and 1 at end of your timeline (whatever you want it to be for opacity) then connect that key's output to "PhoenixFDSimulator1.trRampAlpha_s[1].trRampAlpha_s_Value";

I've done a quick test and it seems to work. However would this be evaluated during maya batch rendering is to be seen.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Indeed, animating the curves does not work, I just found that recently as well. Will be fixed for 3.0 for Maya, but for now the texture workaround is the only way if you are not using Simple Smoke.

Cheers!