Welding

A simple exercise to test the pipeline from 3ds max to the internet.

This was supposed to be a simple animation test to simulate the welding process.  The original recipe seemed simple enough: an object animated on the path, with a look-at constrain emits particles which are then converted into blobmeshes.  The sparks should have been even easier. Finally, a simple expression would drive the light intensity to get the flickering effect.

Then a quick render, conversion into an animation and posted on the blog.

Well, it wasn't so simple.
The blobmesh update is not efficient - the mesh generated is continually updated as new particles are added creating a really bad flickering effect. I didn't mind so much as the light would flicker it would hide that bug. But still: this put a serious dent in other ideas I had about this. 

The Animation Curve is - well  - buggy.  I can't convert it to a Bezier, so I ended doing a very linear animation. Correction: it's not buggy: 3ds max simply decided to put a linear controller  instead of the default Bezier controller as the path constrain default.

The sparks generated by Pflow stopped working at some frames - I'll have to investigate to see if this is due to a memory limitation, a bug or a problem between the screen and the chair.

I wrote a simple expression using the noise function. For some strange reason, (might have something to do with the update time of the particles system) but the expression kept returning a value of 0.5.  I had to go around rewriting the expression around a sine wave instead.