Gerry

Yep, I did that. What I found was that I could drill down into the Hair System and the Hair Emitter under Groups, but not under Actions (under Actions, I can see these, but can't access surface settings or anything). It seems that I can set (or change) color settings under Groups but not under Actions, but it doesn't set keyframes, and the timeline changes from frames to percentage. Right now I'm trying out an animated image (QT movie) and setting keyframes, but that doesn't seem to be working either. Very frustrating.

Is there still a limit on the number of plugins on the Mac side?

I've been trying to animate the color of a hair material that I'm using for pine needles. No image, just particle hair. But apparently you can't animate the color? I've been messing with this for awhile and then discovered that the settings I was changing in the pws weren't under the "actions" but were the settings for the instance. So I think I should change to an image that I can then animate like an animated decal. But does anyone know if particle hair color can change over time?

Happy Birthday Will!

No, that's clear Rodney, and all good points. Now that the "magic" is starting I want to punch it up still more! Lots of AfterEffects ideas come to mind. Question though, is how I'm "coloring" the bells. I'm using an environment map, which has no settings for strength of the material, and the quick-and-dirty solution was to have the grayscale model fade out and the color model fade in, but it's not a very smooth transition if you watch it. Can the environment map be an animated decal? I should look into that, I need a smoother transition there. EDIT:, Yep, the environment map can be animated. Works great.

thanks guys. Steve, I may ask Jody (MMZ Timelord) as he's done some rendering for me before, but thanks, I'll let you know!

Here's a partial render with some of the color changing in place. Still lots of tweaking to go, but in general it's working out just fine I think. Render times are murder though, even on this half-size. I may need to get some rendering help. WholethingTest_h264.mov

Could the two problems be related somehow? Can I ask how you rigged the model and if you saved progressive versions? My main question would be about how the bones came to be doubled, though that doesn't address darthlister's problem. EDIT: I would also recommend Holmes's CP weighting tutorial. It explains everything and then some!

Here's a small wireframe just to show the correct speed for the falling snow. File's a little large because I left the music in. It's a nice clip we're getting from stockmusicsite.com. The objects will start changing from b&w to color about 8 secs. into this scene, then Seasons Greetings will write across the screen. The whole thing from beginning to end will be 1:27. I did take Rodney's advice, rendering just some foreground snow with bigger flakes and an alpha channel for compositing, which will come in very handy. I think I'm ready to move on to the color changing, which will be a challenge. There will be three methods for doing this and it will depend on how the objects themselves are colored. Methods are: Swap out model, animate materials, or fade in color decals. Then I may wrap up with something like that image above that had too much glow on it. I'm going to try for that with a sort-of sepia effect, with color as an accent. SnowfallTest03_h264.mov

really cool and fun explanation!

Happy Birthday!

D'oh, I completely overlooked the "compositing" part of your comments! Of course, that makes good sense and gives lots of flexibility.

For the time being I'm not going to post the render I did. It's an easy fix and I don't want to post stuff that needs such obvious work. Rodney, if I'm understanding your comments, do you mean three snow emitters at varying distance from the camera? By coincidence, I did set up the scene with three snow emitters, although my only purpose was to vary the snowflakes' appearance. So, three emitters, and three different sprites, and currently they're all sitting in the same space. But when you say "place those between three levels within your scene" you mean just placing them at different distances, right?

Thanks folks! I finished that render with everything in it, but the snow is falling much too fast and looks more like hailstones. I may post it later but it will still need a few tweaks.

Thanks for the comments. I'm rendering a half-size version with all the elements in, all the particles and snow. It's taking a few hours but if it comes out okay I'll post it tomorrow.

the fun/challenging part was animating the flames so they react to the movement of the candles. It's all hand-animated, no dynamic constraints or anything.

Here's a test where I've isolated the candles just to test their animation. Of course in the final they'll be spewing streaks but I've left the particles out on this one. Holiday2012candleShootTest01_h264.mov

this is very nice work! I like the first two very much, keep it up and post more!

Hey, these are great ideas! I kept messing around with the settings but couldn't seem to get back to a normal render. As much as I like the effect, it's a problem if I can't control it. I finally just made a second camera and replaced the original. Seems to be working. However I'm coming around to Robert's idea about having the color fade back in as the snow falls. And the snow test that Johnl3D put together is very helpful!

Thanks for the comments! I think what I had in mind for the overall appearance was Ambience Occlusion and I searched the forum for a some pointers or a tut of some kind, but nothing came up in a search. Can someone point me to a starting point? EDIT: I was messing with the AO settings (and some of the other new stuff) and now I've got an effect turned on that I can't turn off. My renders are coming out like this...

At the end "Season's Greetings" will be writ across the screen,and that may be in red, don't know. I had a mental image of "all white" but as I work on this it just appears like grayscale. So now I'm not so sure on the minimalism.

Here's a quick still of my holiday animation so far; still working on the layout. It will all be "white" (or grayscale anyway), and the three candles shoot off like roman candles, then snow drifts down over everything. Hopefully it will go quick as I don't have a lot of time this year.

thanks robert. There are a couple of things I would adjust. I've d/l'ed it but haven't looked at it yet.

A cheat sheet already exists but I don't know where! I've got a printed copy. I'll hunt around for the pdf but maybe someone else here knows.

Nice, John! thanks!