Particle/Material Help

[turner006]

Hello,

I was wondering if someone could help me with a problem I'm having. I have particles that I want to be smoke, but the material I'm using is just awful. It renders as squares the majority of the time and the colour is off as well. If someone could help me get the particles to render a nice smoke like shape (not that I know what type of shape that is!). I would like them to start of light greyish, then go to dark grey and then black over their life but because I have particles spawning and dying all at seperate times, I'd be happy if they can just stay a darkish grey colour. I have a pretty tight deadline for this so any help would be much appreciated and the quicker the better! I've attached a 2010, 2011 and 2012 version of my file so feel free to open it up and have a look. Just a heads up though, there is a lot of particles in the file so performance might be a bit of an issue.

Thanks,

Jack

pre_rendered_scene2010.zip

[turner006]

So I'm rendering out the test you said to do and all seems well so far, even though my render times are slowly creeping up at the moment, despite it being a tiny resolution and everything set to drafts. I was messing around with my actual scene earlier and I noticed that on a frame where the fire doesn't render, if I swap the render node to geometry it renders fine. Is it the material that's causing these problems?

[krueger_1]

I think it's the keep apart being random. You can turn the viewport % up to 100 and everything will play correctly in the viewport, but sometimes the particles disappear in the render. The blobmesh and material aren't even involved yet so that means it's somewhere in the particles. Adjusting the accel limit is what I've found to make the renderings more stable.

[turner006]

More stable will do me fine. If this test render works alright then I'm sorted. If there's a few frames missing I'll just cut in either a geometry rendered version or a play blast version from the viewport.

[turner006]

I must be doing something wrong with this test render. My frames are taking well over a minute to render and it's saying to do the whole 1800 frames it's going to take over 15 hours. In the render window I have Image Precision (Antialiasing) set to Draft: Min 1/64, Max 1/4. Soft Shadows Precision set to off. Final Gather Precision to disable. Glossy Reflection Precision set to off and Glossy Refractions set to 0.1X - Draft. In my scene I selected everything apart from particle flows, particle engines and blobmesh and hid it all. Have I missed something?

[krueger_1]

Hide the blobmesh too. The only thing you're looking for is the particles themselves.

[turner006]

I managed to get a few hundred frames rendered and there was a few that were still missing the fire but nowhere near as much as before so seeing as it's only a few seconds worth I'm just going to render the scene with geometry for particles for the frames that aren't working and then stitch them together. My final scene is going through the render farm as we speak so hopefully it will all be finished soon!

Thanks again for all your help