I have noticed that Particle Emitters seem to always start emitting at whatever frame you start to view the animation at.

For example, I added a particle emitter (Rain) to a project. The emitter starts emitting at Frame 0. However, as with all emitters, it takes it a few frames to get fully going and I just want frames when it is fully going. As such I rendered only frames after with the particle emitter was fully going in the preview. Much to my surprise, when I looked at the rendered video, it showed the particle emitters startup sequence (as if the particle emitter started emitting at my start frame).

Is this intentional or a bug? Or am I doing something wrong? Should I, for example, be turning the Bake Animation option on to bake the particle animation and then render it from a future frame?  

"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

I am sitting here at the moment dealing with the same problem. It has always been the a way particles act for some reason. Whatever the cause is it seems to be since IC 5 as far as I know. I always have to make the scene much longer to get around that problem and then after making the video,cut out that part in my video editor. Seems that it has to restart at any point you start watching from (in IC)....verified. It would be nice to hear why from RL.


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I have not tried it yet but maybe, as I suggested, you make the scene longer and then turn on the Bake Animation option. Hopefully this will bake the animation to those frames and then when you render from frame X instead of frame 0, it may render correctly (because the particle animation was baked to the frames previously). As I said, I have not yet had a chance to try that.



"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

It's not a bug , it's how it is building. Iclone particles have no "Start frame at" feature as lot of particles system today. Iclone particles start to compute at the frame you begin to render, that why particles needed time to be "plain". Think like in a real set when Director said :"Start rain!!" then "cameras rolling!" then "Action!"   :P

I always allow or add extra frames to allow the particles to start generating. Usually 150 frames or so will be enough.;)



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Like Mark I always make sure that I have at least 2-3 seconds of leeway at the start and end of every scene to allow for accurate editing in my NLE. It's just like when I'm filming, the camera is always running well before any action gets started, and stays running after it stops. Dissolves and other transitions need footage to work correctly.

Gerry

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I like the director analogy but, likely, in the director analogy the director would yell "Start rain machine" and wait for it to get up to speed and then yell "Action!" from which point the cameras would start roll. It would be nice to have a similar feature in iClone so that the build up frames could be removed in iClone and not have to be removed in post production.

I understand the described concept of adding extra frames to the beginning of the sequence but as far as I can tell, these frames cannot be removed during the iClone render - they need to be removed in post production. As such it would be very nice to have a "Render From Frame X But Write Out From Frame Y" option so it would not be necessary to cut out the startup up frames in post production.

For example, assuming it takes 150 frames for the particle emitter to get to its desired state, it would be nice to be able to tell iClone, please start calculating from frame 0 but only write out frames (to the output render file) if they are equal to or greater than 150 (where 150 would be a text box, in the render dialog, that could be changed at will). I would assume this should be easy to do because all it should be is a "if current frame is equal to or more than MinWriteFrame add frame to render file" (i.e. if the current frame is less than the MinWriteFrame then iClone could still do all the current operations exactly as they are done now except for writing the frame to the output).

"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

Some animation programs have negative time for the timeline so you can set that to whatever value needed for the particles to start at zero time. I never use iClone rendered output directly, but it is kind of a waste to have to render the extra frames. You may be able to speed that up by have a camera look at a something visually simple before the actual scene starts with particles.

EDIT: Added: I believe there is a feature request for improved particles. Something like a pre-generation duration could be added to that request.

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Agreed. I typically do a project per segment (reduce file size of any one project) so I typically do join them in post processing. However, I prefer to generate segments (rendered video) that I can just drop in without having to remember to trim the front end. I mean it isn't difficult to do but if the function would not be hard to implement in iClone, why not add it?  

animagic (5/16/2016)

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EDIT: Added: I believe there is a feature request for improved particles. Something like a pre-generation duration could be added to that request.

That would be great. 

"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

Yes Lord, lot of particles system have this feature "start frame at" means if you put 150 for exemple it begin like it would at 150 frame rendering.
In game engine when you add particles ,you can set an "always run" feature even you don't  hit "play" button.
Hope Iclone 7 will implement this features.