CGTalk - Polygon particles

David Lightbown

02-12-2002, 07:35 PM

Hey everyone,

I want to make a particle system that will turn into a bunch of tri or quad polys following the path of the particles, so I can bring that animation into a real time engine without having to use a middleware tool... any ideas ? Is there a way to transform a particle system in Max into a polygonal animation ?

thanks !

David

David Lightbown

02-12-2002, 07:36 PM

I've tried SuperSpray using an instanced item... is this the best way ?

David

xynaria

02-12-2002, 08:43 PM

I can't quite grasp what you're after but you might want to try either PCloud or PArray as these allow you to use an object based emitter as well as instanced geometry, . The object emitter can be an animated object. :)

subagio

02-13-2002, 02:45 AM

I'm not exactly sure I know what you mean either. You want to get explicit anims into your realtime engine, but how will you spawn the geometry? Do you have an arbitrary amount of polys just sitting somewhere waiting to be animated into view? It's a bit of a toss up how you'll do the equation between the spawned particles in max and them... Are you needing to export each particle as an animation path data stream?

This is really one that would be SO much easier to have your programmer replicate in the engine. A precalculated particle system is a LOT of data.

--C

David Lightbown

02-13-2002, 05:23 AM

Sub:

yeah I know :) But we're crazy like that. Actually we're on a tight dealine, just need something quick and dirty and we'll add in our own particle engine afterwards... the coders are busy with other stuff.

in any case, it's been kinda put on the backburner so I'll take a look into it myself... wanted 2 cents from a few peeps...

Thanks !

subagio

02-13-2002, 01:51 PM

Alright then. If you're looking to just get the animation data out of the particle system on a particle by particle basis, search for 'particle' at www.scriptspot.com There are 2 that I think are pertinent to the problem, one that creates a dummy for each particle and one that extracts spline paths.

If you're a scripter yourself, another idea, if you've got a rather specific scenario is to just create a bunch of nodes and write a script to animate them. That way you'll expose the logic for the programmers to replicate in game later on.

--C

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