Napalm: Spawner and more...

[rapscallion]

Hey...Hi...so the problem I am having with Napalm is that Spawner and certain other features just don't seem to work...I know that sounds crazy, but I've follwed the same tutorials over and over and over trying to get it going, but no good...and then when you run the sample scenes it all seems fine, but I have copied all the settings down and tried to recreate the sample scenes, but again no good...I have also tried to simply cloning the various pieces to recreate the scene within the scene that I know works, but again nothing...I don't know if it matters, but I'm using LW7.5 and Mac OSX 10.2.5...

...this same problem has been posted at the Napalm3D yahoo group a couple times, but noone has ever replied to those posts which are both several months old at this point...in fact, nobody has posted anything to that place or the DR Napalm forum for many months...

...anyone have any answers? thanks in advance for any help you can offer...wishing the best...from the void...j.p.rapscallion...

[noiseboy]

Have you downloaded the spawner example scene?
http://www.dynamic-realities.com/support/onlinedocs/Napalm/Spawner_sample.zip

this gives you a good start. I too had problems until I saw that you needed a separate spawner emitter to the base emitter.There is then a fountain controller for each emitter. The spawning control is only turned on for the spawning fountain. This all worked for me and I haven't really had much experience with particles. If I can help with my limited knowledge I will try. May be we'll both learn something.

[rapscallion]

Hey...Hi...thanks for replying...I have in fact tried the sample scene...in fact, I tried several sample scenes for Spawner, and they all worked beautifully...the problem is when I try to recreate the scene...I've been working with Napalm for about a year and I am pretty comfortable with it, but I never needed Spawner before so I never tried it...but it seems that I am unable to recreate their example...I have taken screen grabs of every setting and meticulously recreated over and over and nothing happens...I have also cloned the Napalm Controllers in an attempt to simply make another sample of the same effect inside the same scene, and this doesn't work, which is kinda' crazy because the settings are copied exactly when you make the clones...I have also followed the tutorial in the manual about ten times or so...a few other people have posted this same problem but noone has ever replied...so perhaps I can send you a copy of one of my scenes that has what I think are all the correct settings and if it works on your computer then I can at least narrow my trouble down to software glitch or something...but if it doesn't work on your machine maybe you can analyze it to find out what I am doing wrong...thanks again...wishing the best...from the void...j.p.rapscallion...

[noiseboy]

by all means send me the scene file. I'm no expert in Napalm but you never know it could be a second opinion will help, and I always keep a spare opinion just in case :-) It may be something external to Napalm causing the issue. FWIW I recreated the test scene from scratch and it worked in a very similar way. Mail it to magenta@blueyonder.co.uk and I'll look at it over the weekend.

[rapscallion]

Hey...Hi...just thought some of you might like to know how all this turned out, so...I sent noiseboy a small non-working scene which I had created with settings that I believed to be create...he fired it up and it worked just fine on his machine...so no user error after all...turns out that I simply needed to get the latest update to Naplam (3.45) which was designed specifically to solve this Spawner issue...wouldn't it be great if DR had a spot on their site which outlined what the changes are from update to update so you can check to see whats been fixed each time? when you download the update it has a text with the info, but by that time I had already wasted over three weeks with this silly problem...anyhow...thanks again, noiseboy...wishing everyone the best...from the void...j.p.rapscallion...