Completed a new tutorial creating sparks in Blender by Andrew Price at Blenderguru.com. Short tutorial but very informative especially on some new nodes in the compositor I have not used.

I rendered the animation when I went to bed last night and it took 6hrs and 36min to complete from the first saved frame to the last (100) frames. When I got to work this morning (about 2 hours ago) I output the files in four different formats H.264, JPEG, MPEG, and Raw. The only file that would play on the players they have at work was the MPEG file. I will try the others when I get home and see what will play on my computer, probably all of them, then upload the one appropriate for YouTube.

As a side note, I was using Blender 2.65 release candidate 1 for this tutorial testing it out for any glaring bugs (pun intended) 🙂

None found so far.

Final rendered scene prior to animation

Getting Close – New Nodes in use for fading out the sparks

Things did not seem to be working correct here for some reason

First shot at the render – no color or fade out of the sparks yet