Let’s see, that is the situation:
My team and I are about to bring the stuff we worked on together to finish our animation movie, we are using the cycles renderer for it.
My part were mostly physic related things (particle systems mainly). Now there are the scenes, in which those physics/particlesystem animations have to get put in. Scenes and simulations are all in seperated .blends, since everyone worked at their own part.
Here is where the problem originates. While simple smoke animations (mostly the stuff you get by using quick smoke + a little bit of editing) can easily be imported via the link feature (or could simply be redone if needed), there is exactly one particle system (in a single .blend) in which a lot of editing time flew in (from ab beginners’ point of view).
It is my whish to import this particle system just as it is into an existing scene, while still being able to edit it in the scene, but using the link or append feature to import the emitter + domain just does not work as i expected it to do after succesfully importing the simulations mentioned before. Of course my lacking blender experience (since i am still a beginner) plays a big part of it.
Here is what i understand about the link and append feature:
-both can be used to import things from a .blend into another file by selecting the thing you want to import.
-while the link feature only links exactly what you selected, the append feauture also imports everything what your object was “connected” to in its original file (like materials etc)
-to edit linked thing you have to make your imports local
The edits which have to be done to the particle system in the final scene are:
- transformations to set it in the right place and scale it down to a matching size
- set the emission starting point to another frame
While the transformations itself are not a problem, because this works just fine after making it local if its linked or by using append, the actual smoke simulation does not play out as it was in its original scene. It seems like it starts in the middle of the anmation and skips frames, or like it would just cut off the first half of it.
Of course i can also it in the original file so that linking this simulation to the final scene will have it set at the position it needs to be, i am still trying around here.
Additionally i cant set the emission starting point properly anymore. This might not work, because i baked and rendered the original simulation, so the emission settings of the particle system is greyed out. Also, the starting point of the emission in the final scene is somewhere around frame 240 and the max starting point is at 200.8.
Is there a way to change this in the animation settings or can you somehow just set the whole simulation to another point on the timeline?
To end this post, here is where i need help with:
-Setting the Emission to another point in the Timeline
-a right way to import my animations (or eventually other stuff), so that it works without any further problems described in the text
of course this might be trivial things, so might be something what a beginner should know, but it just wont get to me at the moment.
As i read through the text, it might also be possible that this is the wrong section of the forum for such questions, because it does not really have to do with general particle system stuff. I opened a thread here, because the particle system is where my problems originate from.
This really is all the infos i have at the moment.