rendering particles

[AtrusDni]

blobies render in render view and cloud renders in render view - by render view i mean Maya Software or Mental Ray. All the rest have to be done in hardware render (sprites, streaks, etc) as far as i know.

[Bonedaddy]

To get the particle attributes to show up in software renders, you need to make a particle cloud shader and plug in a particleSamplerInfo node's output into all relevant attributes -- e.g. Out Color to the shader's Color and Life Color; Out Transparency to the shader's Transparency and Life Transparency, etc. The Hypergraph will set up the most commonly used connections pretty easily.

[hominid]

Hi Bonedaddy,

Could you elaborate on setting up that particle shader? Perhaps show a hypergraph screenshot showing the connections used. That would be very helpful.

Cheers,
Pete

[vancliff]

If you dont have the proper hardware (ie. video card) on your computer you will hardly see any hardware render particle out of maya.

You need to have a quadro or any workstation class video card for it. It wont work with the geforce series.

[dEnbom]

Vancliff, that is not correct.

Outputting particles in hardware is a simple task that basically any graphics-card will manage since most consumer cards are game-oriented (hardware). I've used a wide range of cards for this from geforce 4 to radeon 9800 to radeon 1600mobile to geforce 7600 and also quadro 1400 and some fireGL card.

Here the case was outputting particles in OTHER renderers, I just wanted to clarify in case anybody else missed that aswell.

Azloha! If you want to output the "regular" particle render types, why not have a look at renderman for maya! It can output all particle types and shade them and render them incredibly fast with motion blur and dof etc. You could even displace the surface of hw particles such as spheres.

[kungfuelmosan]

ive found it pretty simple and straight forward to just instance a little cube or sphere etc to the particles if you have sufficient hardware power and not too many particles - or bonedaddys idea is also a good one! :)

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