software vs hardware particles

[Tolerate]

The first thing that came to mind is flexibility. if you use sprites u are limited to those sprites. By using a software cloud particle (for example) you can use expressions and such to drive the colour, transparency etc of the particles. Obviously not available to us using sprites

[1armedScissor]

you can't use an expression to drive the colour and transparency of the sprites? How come? There must be a way to do it.

[Tolerate]

actually u could be right

so erm... *shrug*

[gmask]

Originally posted by ooga booga
you can't use an expression to drive the colour and transparency of the sprites? How come? There must be a way to do it.

You can use an expressions to control what image is assigned to each individual sprite therefore within that you can control the "color" and "opacity" with the RGB and Alpha channels from the image assigned to a given sprite but not in the same way you could with other particle types.

[1armedScissor]

thanks for the feedback everyone, I really appreciate it. So basically the rule of thumb would be, use hardware rendered particles for simpler effects and short deadlines, and use software rendered particles for more complex effects and where rendering times aren't an issue.

Is there a way to render dynamics effects on a renderfarm? I was told there isn't because each processor would calculate the dynamics differently, is there a way to "bake" the simulation into the file so a renderfarm could be used? What about caching the particles before rendering, would this work, or is there some other way?

[gmask]

>>>So basically the rule of thumb would be, use hardware rendered particles for simpler effects and short deadlines, and use software rendered particles for more complex effects and where rendering times aren't an issue.

No this isn't really the case.. hthe hardware particles can more easily acheive certain effects and in some cases do it very quickly. Often I use them both to create the overall effect.

>>Is there a way to render dynamics effects on a renderfarm? I was told there isn't because each processor would calculate the dynamics differently, is there a way to "bake" the simulation into the file so a renderfarm could be used? What about caching the particles before rendering, would this work, or is there some other way?

yes it's called creating a particle cache. In some cases it is more effecient to jus trender a particle system on one system seeing as how caches can use huge amounts of drive space.

IE if you have 5 comptuers and 5 particles systems to render it may make more sense to use one comptuer per particle system and then composite them instead of dividing each rende rup between the different systems if each particle cache would have taken 20GB a piece.

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