Where are my sparks?!

DubiousDrewski · Post by **DubiousDrewski** » Mon Feb 20, 2012 10:37 am

Check out my progress on this animation.

I haven't animated in 9 years, so this is a lot of fun for me. One problem though: I have animated some sparks to appear exactly when the scissors shut. They show up and animate just fine in the work space, and then disappear after a few frames, like they're supposed to. But when I render, they don't appear from the scissors and instead pop in and out of existence all over the frame randomly. You can see them in the GIF.

I've uploaded the .anme file here, if anyone would like to see what I mean.

Is this a glitch, or did I screw up somehow?

jonbo · Post by **jonbo** » Mon Feb 20, 2012 4:09 pm

You've got the hand held camera option on and motion blur on the sparks,this is causing unpredictable results with the particle layer. You can either shut this off and animate the camera by hand or use vector shapes instead of a particle layer for the sparks. The soft edge effect on the sparks and the short length the particle layer is on, makes this a very subtle effect and really hard to see when it does render.

DubiousDrewski · Post by **DubiousDrewski** » Mon Feb 20, 2012 8:56 pm

Ah, thank you! You're so helpful.

Funny thing is, I turned on handheld cam to see what it looked like, but I still can't find a way to turn it off, so I guess I'm keeping it until I Google how to turn it off.

jonbo · Post by **jonbo** » Mon Feb 20, 2012 9:13 pm

Right click and drag in the timeline and select the camera key frames. Right click on one of these selected key frames to call up the interpolation menu. You'll see that the noisy interpolation has been chosen, select smooth or linear and those key frames should disappear.