Whoever came up w/ the fireball expression in the expression cookbook, i'm not worthy!

that said, as silly as this may sound, could someone point me in the right direction as to *where* to put $F in that formula to make it animate smoothly?

perhaps i was close … once, but my methods for learning are usually rather random.

related to this q is the speed of the playback. what's the workflow for messing around w/ algorithms on a slowish pc? and, are expressions cookable? … meaning is it necessary and/or wanted to do something like this to make the rendering as fast as possible.

thanks in adv. peace & 42

I'm not sure if noise() expression gives you this possibility to smooth animate at all. You would need a continuous noise like perlin or Worley to achieve it (I can be wrong in distinction which noise is and which is not continuous though ).

(Although I've just checked it and noise() animate fine, but perhaps you needs smoother star. You can also check snoise, turb, sturb as a replacers)

You also should possible use $FF instead of $F. $FF is a float what can have a meaning here.

As a workaround you can prepare a number (like 4) of your starts (just copy iso surface four time, tweak parameters and lock in down) and blend them in time (see BlendShapes SOP). This way you will have faster feedback in viewport and fine control on animation! Two in one !


cheers,
sy.

Perhaps not smooth, but this animates it.

noise(($X*$X + $Y*$Y + $Z*$Z)^ .5/3, atan2($Y, $X)/fit($FF,0,240,1,20), atan2($Z, $Y)/fit($FF,0,240,1,20)) + (1-($X*$X + $Y*$Y + $Z*$Z)^.5/5)