If you have a technical support question that is not answered by the information below, please contact us at support@genarts.com. Be sure to include your company name and info about what Discreet version, and what Sapphire Plug-ins version you are running. When you load a Sapphire plug-in the version number should be printed on the shell window where your Discreet product was started. If you have a non-technical license question, please email license@genarts.com.

For support on Combustion, please visit our AE Plug-ins page instead.

Frequent issues:

• My license doesn't work. A watermark appears:   On SGI   On Burn   On Linux
• Do Sapphire Plug-ins work with Autodesk's 2007 products?
• On Linux, using S_Wipes I get corruption at the bottom of the frame.
• In Batch, I get warnings saying "FrameNo out of bounds (API Bug)".
• I'm getting a "Bad state 0x21 for Spark buf" warning.
• On Smoke, I get a crash when exiting the soft sparks editor.
• Smoke 6.0 crashes after using a spark such as FlysEye or EmbossMask.
• Some screen parameters are being set to 0 when entering a spark.
• In Batch, there is garbage or noise in the image.
• How can I load old v2 setups into v3?
• All Sapphire Plug-ins give a "CAN NOT LOAD" error.
• One Sapphire plug-in aborts when first loaded, although the others work fine.
• Loading a Batch setup gives default spark parameters instead of the saved values.
• Loading a plug-in in Batch gives an "uncaught fatal abort" error.
• How can I uninstall Sapphire Plug-ins?

• If you are on a 64bit SGI IRIX system, and get just black results with a watermark, please install version 3.072 and try again.
• Check that the System ID of your Discreet workstation is the same as the one listed with the license you were provided. On a shell, type the command sysinfo. If they are different, please send us the correct sysinfo.
• Make sure a different spark is loaded after the key is changed. They only re-read the key when they are first loaded or after the Discreet application is restarted.
• Make sure the s_license.text file was saved after being modified. Sometimes nedit doesn't warn very well if permissions prevent saving.
• Check that there is a space between the "key:" and the number. If a date was given with the key, make sure it is included, with dashes between day-month-year, not underscores or slashes. Also make sure a space is between the date and the following license number. If no date was given with the key, make sure you remove any old date that might be there from a previous temporary license.
• If you commented out an old license, make sure you used "//" instead of "#" before the commented lines. Also make sure there is no "//" before the new license line.
• Make sure the key is installed in s_license.text in the same directory that the sparks are being used from. If you have a copy of the sparks in another directory or you load them from a file system on another machine, you'll also need to install the key there. To check this, Alt-Click on a spark button and look at the directory listed in the box at the top of the spark-load page. Make sure it says "/usr/discreet/sparks/sapphire_3.0" and not something else such as "/usr/discreet/inferno_4.1/sparks/sapphire_3.0".
• Make sure the date on the machine is correct.

• If your license still doesn't work, please email us:

  A copy of the message that should be printed on the shell when you try to load a spark. It should start with something like: "Loading: S_Glows, Version 3.06, D25P1 ..."

  Also, type the following command to a unix shell:
  find /usr/discreet/* -name s_license.text -print -exec cat {} \;
  and send all the information that is printed out.

On Burn, my license doesn't work. A watermark appears.

For Burn on 32bit Linux:

• On your Linux workstation, open the file /usr/discreet/sparks/sapphire_3.0/s_license.text and check that your license was entered there and saved properly. Make sure there are no spaces after any backslashes. Cutting a pasting from an email copy of your license is the safest way to enter it.
• Check the Burn console for messages. If you see a FlexLM error "The hostid specified in the license file does not match the hostid of this system" please check the lmhostid of your machine and if necessary send us the correct one. If you don't know how to find the lmhostid you can just send us a copy of your Discreet Burn license itself which can usually be found in /usr/local/flexlm/licenses/DL_license.dat.

• Make sure you have installed a serial number, and are not trying to use a FlexLM license. FlexLM licenses are not supported on 64bit Linux.
  If you have recently upgraded from 32bit to 64bit Burn workstations, please contact license@genarts.com. to request a transfer to serial number licenses. Please be sure to include your company name, the number of Burn workstations you have, and your license server host ID.

• Make sure you have run the Sapphire Plug-ins installer on the Burn workstations instead of just copying the files or imaging the disks.
• Make sure you are not running an old beta version of the software.
• Make sure you have a working Sapphire Plug-ins license on the Discreet workstation submitting the Burn process.
• Check that the date on your Burn workstation is correct.
• If the license still doesn't work, please email us a copy of this log file /usr/discreet/sparks/sapphire_3.0/s_log.text on your Burn workstation.

• Check the shell where you started Smoke/Flint and see if any useful information is printed there when you load a plug-in.

• Make sure you have run the Sapphire Plug-ins installer on your workstation instead of just copying the files or imaging the disk.

• Make sure the date on your computer is correct.

• If the Ethernet address of your computer has changed since you ran the installer, you can get this watermark. Try reinstalling Sapphire Plug-ins and reentering your serial number and see if that helps.

The workaround is to either use the spark in Batch, or slightly animate an angle or other parameter which will cause the corrupted buffer to be recalculated every frame.

The workaround is to edit each spark node, and change the end frame number in the spark's timeline to be greater or equal to the end frame number in your Batch timeline.

This behavior should be improved in Flame 9.0.

• If possible, use Flame 8.3 or Inferno 5.3 or greater. Those releases include a fix for this.
• Also, make sure you are using Sapphire Plug-ins 3.05 or greater. If necessary, download and install the most recent version. If you are using Discreet 8.3/5.3 or greater with Sapphire 3.05 or greater and still see this problem, please let us know.
• A temporary workaround is to separate the action nodes and the sparks into independent batch trees. It is also recommended that you have at least 2GB of memory. Adjusting the Memory token in Discreet's config file to allow for more memory buffers might also help in some cases.

If you are still on a 32bit Irix system, you can alternatively install both Sapphire v2 and v3 on your system at the same time. This allows v2 setups to simply be loaded and used as before. However, be aware that the names of the sparks are the same in both versions, which can lead to some confusion, and sometimes the older version may continue to be used unintentionally.

The fix is to use a script provided by Discreet that can update your batch setups for you automatically. Look in:
/usr/discreet/flame_7.1/bin/BatchConvertSparksTo40.pl
There should be some documentation there as well as the script.

How can I un-install Sapphire Plug-ins version 3?

On Linux: open a shell window, type su to become root, and then type: rpm -e SapphireSparks

On Irix: open a shell window, type su to become root, and then type: rm -r /usr/discreet/sparks/sapphire_3.0