Fire Walls

I'm trying to create a Wall of Flames. I created a pretty good texture using Kai's Power tools. The difficult part is getting both the edges and portions of the interior to be transparent. I can create a transpaency map where the edges are partially transparent, but I can't animate it because the top edge has to remain partially transparent. I guess to be a little more descritive, I have a flat plane that will be my wall. It's got a fire texture moving up in the Y axis. I have transparency map that is also moving up the axis, but at a different rate. If I make the left and right side transparent, can't make the top transparent and still move it up along the y axis. Suggestions?

Here ya go...

Go into Modeller. Find the location of the BOTTOM of the fire wall, and the height of the wall. The Bottom # will be the texture center, and the height'll be used to figure out the falloff.

Go to Layout and find your firewall surface. Set the transparency of your SURFACE (not the texture) to 100%.

Go into the Trans. Texture Map (the T). Go to the Texture Center, and punch in the Y coord you got in modeler (the BOTTOM) into the Y in the Texture Center.

The whole purpose of that thing above was for the Texture Falloff. Since falloffs always go AWAY from the center, you would want the center at the bottom.

Go to texture falloff. figure out what percent of 1 meter the height of your wall is ( 2 meters is 200%, 1/2 meter is 50%, ect.) and punch that into the Y falloff (as a PERCENT, like .5 for 50%). Hit F9.

What this SHOULD do is make a nice, gently gradient from completly solid at the bottom to 100% transparent at the top (the texture falls off to no effect, so the 100% surface transpanrency kicks in. If the surface trans. was 0%, the map would disolve into a solid surface.)

A quick note: You may have to select Negative Image for the map to look correct with the 100% transparent surface.

Hope this helps...

Joe Angell
jangell@risd.edu