ModuleAnimateHeat question

[martinezfg11]

I made an emissive animation for heat tiles that I want to glow during reentry. My question; is ModuleAnimateHeat the appropriate module to use? All the tutorials I've seen have that module linked to engines only. Is there a way for this to animate only during reentry?

[NecroBones]

Originally, before the thermal system was added, the heat animations were only useful for engines. But yes, you can use that for anything that gets hot now. In fact, engines for the most part should [I]not[/I] use it anymore (except in a few special cases), and instead use "FXModuleAnimateThrottle".

[fairy]

[quote name='NecroBones']Originally, before the thermal system was added, the heat animations were only useful for engines. But yes, you can use that for anything that gets hot now. In fact, engines for the most part should [I]not[/I] use it anymore (except in a few special cases), and instead use "FXModuleAnimateThrottle".[/QUOTE]

How does FXModuleAnimateThrottle work exactly, and how is it different from ModuleAnimateHeat? I've made a bunch of engines for my own use, but I'm unsure of how to go about the emissive engine nozzles. Is there a tutorial/explanation on FXModuleAnimateThrottle somewhere?

[Randazzo]

ModuleAnimateHeat is tied to the temperature of an object. The hotter it gets, the further along the emissive animation will progress. Before 1.0.5 the animation would begin to display around 500-700 degrees, depending how you had the emissive set up. Now even with the animation beginning at 15 seconds, it doesn't seem to display until around 1000 degrees.

FXModuleAnimateThrottle is tied to the throttle output of the engine. The higher the throttle, the faster the emissive reaches it's maximum.

[NecroBones]

It works mostly the same. I don't think there's a tutorial, since the switchover just happened in KSP 1.0.5. The module existed before that, but has just been overhauled to be more useful.

It should look like this:

[code]
MODULE
{
name = FXModuleAnimateThrottle
animationName = <YourAnimationName>
responseSpeed = 0.001
dependOnEngineState = True
dependOnThrottle = True
}
[/code]

The two "depend" fields ensure that the animation is tied to what the engine is actually doing, instead of just what your throttle setting is. The response speed sets how quickly the engine "warms up", with most engines using 0.001. Larger numbers are faster.

[fairy]

Thanks both of you guys, that was very helpful :)

[Azimech]

Okay, interesting. What I want is smoke & fire effects, is that possible too?

[NecroBones]

1 hour ago, Azimech said:

Okay, interesting. What I want is smoke & fire effects, is that possible too?

I'm not sure that can be done with ModuleAnimateHeat. But I would love to be wrong about that.

My understanding is that it "plays" the animation, but merely picks a "frame" based on how hot it is, and displays that. Whereas I think I saw that "FXModuleAnimateThrottle" has an optional setting to change the playback mode between things like "loop" and "pingpong" to have more elaborate animations, but then that's tied to throttle and not temperature.