[acrighton]

Hi,

Attempting (for the 1st time) to do a Multilight animation and struggling to figure it out exactly. Online help states:

"Note: The .emixer file is an ascii format that you can directly open with any text editor to read and/or edit it, allowing you to easily change the intensity and color of each emitter at each frame, to adjust the lights animation to your needs."

I suspect there's a specific format for the data in the emixer file, but can find no reference to it, or to a sample emixer file. Am I correct in assuming that after I define the max frames, I can load an emixer file with it's defined parameters, and the lighting for each frame will be adjusted according to the content of this file?

Any help or guidance would be much appreciated.

Alan

[Mihai]

Well you have to first save an emixer file from your sequence There is a menu in the ML panel called Options. So go to Options>File>Save sequence. It will then play through your frame range and save the key frame data in this emixer file which you can then adjust if you want.

[acrighton]

Mihai,

Thanks for the prompt response. I couldn't find any of this documented anywhere, unless of course I'm looking in all the wrong places ...

So, with each keyframe entry in the file, I simply have to edit the value in the emixer file. If I have 100 frames (or whatever qty), I have to manually adjust every keyframe entry to create the ramp on/off lighting effect I'm trying to create. Is there anyway of semi-automating this task, so that start/stop paremeters can simply be plugged in and the incremental changes can be applied to each frame? I don't want to get ahead of myself here, since I'm only just now getting to try out the Multilight feature.

Thanks.

Alan

[Mihai]

I'm not sure what you mean, but setting keyframes, the interpolation will take care of itself in between frames. It's pretty standard keyframing stuff. You can do this right in the emixer, no need to edit the emixer text file. The first frame is already a keyframe so set your values as you want, next move the time slider to say frame 50, set a key frame first (rightclick>Create keyframe), now adjust the values, move slider to another frame, set a keyframe etc. Now play back and you should see your ML animation. Save the emixer file in case you want to apply the same animation to the same scene if it uses multiple cameras for example, or you want to open the MXI at a later date and then load back the ML animation.

[acrighton]

Mihai,

Thanks, got it working just fine.