[Jreed129]

well to explain what Phil can not...

Chris, our lead animator last year, did attempt to use combustion with .png files along with alpha channels to layer render our animation last year. The trouble we ran into last year is we would have had to render everything 4 times for each frame, alpha of front/back and color of front/back (were front and back refer to different layers and distance from camera), if I remember correctly. This also was the first time that we used combustion so we were not sure what we were doing.

Seeing as this process was taking so long we looked into why our animation could not render as each full frame with all layers turned on. In the end when a former team member came back to help us, we used a raytrace material that was overloading all the computers, so we replaced the material with another and rendering was smooth again. and did not take 2 hours on 1 frame.

Why it was over loading them I do not know.