August 2011 - summer summary - RealWorld forums

There will be no new topic this month. Instead, let's review what has happened in the previous six months (bevel, styles, kaleidoscope, artists, colors, scripting). If anything feels incomplete or if you have any questions or suggestions regarding the older topics, feel free to ask.

I am also looking for people, who would like to "organize" a month. There are 3 free slots: September, October and November. The topic could be anything related to computer graphics.

Is the fire/smoke script from your Burning Cursors available for use?

The fire script is a bit tricky and not very user friendly. It needs changes to the cursor editor to be easier to use.

Before it can used, RWDocumentIcon.dll must be copied from icon editor to cursor editor.
Here is the script: fire.rwcommands - it should be placed in the lower toolbar (near the list of frames).

Now, before the script can be used, the frames of the animation must already exist - they may be empty, but they must exist, because the script does not add any frames.
The top layer of the first frame is used to seed the fire and is replaced by the script - so, before running the script, add a new layer to (only) the first frame and use pencil to indicate, where the fire is originating from.

There is a block of parameters at the beginning of the script.

var newperframe = 40;
var color = [1, 0.4, 0.1];
var longevity = 5;
var maindir = 0.6;
var speed = 0.5;

newperframe controls intensity of the fire
color is the fire color; set to black or dark bluish color to create smoke
longevity controls how long a fire particle lives
maindir and speed control the direction of the fire particles; maindir is in radians

In order to get a smooth seamless animation, the number of generated frames should be at least twice as much as the longevity parameter.

Launching the script takes a little while, because preview is being generated. Changing any of the parameters re-generates the preview and that means another pause (turn off the auto-preview if it irritates you).

Hey, I'd be interested in organizing a topic for the September month. The topic would be "Communication via ratings and comments", with the primary purpose being to encourage more rating and commenting on sets. I have a blog post draft for it if you were interested in taking a look at what I planned to say beforehand.

Yes, that would be a great topic - though we should find a shorter 1-2 word phrase for the month name. More in a PM not to spoil things for others .