I’m doing a project in which I need to have in real time some fire, as well as some smoke (not necessarily together) I decided that I want to pre render an image sequence for both fire and smoke, and map them onto a Billboard. How would I get these image sequences to loop?
I’m not set on only using the smoke sim. This is for previz, so it doesn’t need to be 100% physically accurate . Or maybe there’s an easier way to get a fire and smoke loop.
I’m not sure about the “right” way to do it, but one way is to edit the video where the first 3-5 seconds of the video are cut from the front then added to the back end of the video as a fade in. (gamma over in the sequencer I think ).
If you don’t care much about the look, then make a gif sequence using gimp and apply it to a plane as a vid texture set to repeat.
If it’s just previz, just use a particle emitter.
Another clever idea is to generate several layers of “fire and smoke,” each with some (different) prime number of frames. Add each one of them on top of each other, using the compositor: tweak as needed. The end result will be a very long sequence that, although it is repetitive, does not appear to be repetitive. “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”