Baking Volumetric Surfaces Questions

[fgreen]

I have a scene with a half dozen or so emitters applied to nulls, all with volumetric surfaces. The scene currently takes about 15-20 min/frame to render. Not too bad, but I have a LOT of frames in several scenes. Since I've never tried to use the "bake HV object's' feature, I gave it a go yesterday. After 'baking' the surfaces and selecting 'use baked object' (hypervoxels panel/shading tab), I rendered some still frames for a test.

The problem is that no matter which frame in the animation I render (as a still frame), the 'baked' volume looks the same. In other words, it no longer seems to be animating. Thus I was afraid to use the baked objects last night when starting the nightly rendering, and turned them all off. Do the baked volumes only animate when rendering scenes, rather than still frames? Or am I totally missing something in the process? Any insight will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[jeremyhardin]

if i understand what you're asking...

baked volumes aren't really intended for animated hv's. all it's doing is rendering "slices" of the HV's to frames of a Quicktime movie. so each frame is a different slice. so there's no real way to animate them based on the current system, since there's no way to have a sequence of quicktime movies.

[fgreen]

Thanks Jeremy, I'm glad I didn't waste a night of rendering trying it out! Just out of curiosity, what would be a use for baked HV's?

[jeremyhardin]

np! :beerchug: you'd use it for static volumes, like clouds, hanging smoke, ground fog, etc.