Part 2 :

This second part of the tutorial will deal with animation, so our tutorial will become a realistic, live, blazing fire!

If you are still in the Gradient map panel, go up one level to the default Blinn material, press the opacity map button again to enter the Mask map panel, and then press on the Smoke map. We are going now to move the flames up so it will give the illusion of a live fire. Away from the Material Editor, down in the viewport, press the Auto Key Button to activate animation mode. A little further down, to the right of the Auto Key button, press and hold the Default In/Out Tangents for New Keys button and choose linear mode. Drag the animation bar to frame 100. Now return to the Material Editor and under Coordinates > Offset in Z axis spinner, reduce the amount to -500 (Fig.20).

(fig.20)

Again, go back to the viewport and toggle off the animation Auto Key, then slide the animation bar back to zero. Minimize the Material Editor window. In the viewport, in the upper main menu, press Rendering > Render, or make sure the F-lock is toggled on, on your keyboard, and then press F10. The Rendering menu will appear (Fig.21). In the Rendering menu, under Common Parameters and under Time Output, choose Active Time Segment: 0 to 100, so as to render the full animation. Down under the Render Output, press the Files button, and in the Render Output File window, in the blank space for the File Name, write a name for your animation file. Below, in the Save As Type, choose AVI format. Before hitting the save button, up in the blank space for History, make sure you remember the direction to where you have saved your file (or from the Save In blank space, choose another preferable destination). Press save. In the AVI File Compression Setup window, press OK. Hit Render (Fig.22).

(fig.21)

(fig.22)

Be patient while Max renders the animation … After the rendering is finished, in the render window that still appears, press the Save Bitmap button in the most upper left corner of the window; in the Browse Images for Output window, in the most down left corner of the window, press the View button and enjoy your animation! View the final animation here: http://ladokar.googlepages.com/tutorial_01.avi Now you may go back to your scene and play around with the parameters to achieve the result you want … enjoy it and have fun!

(fig.23)

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