CGTalk - Particle Question

Gilgamesh

01-20-2003, 10:47 PM

I have a super spray particle system attached to an object. The object has a path constraint controller that makes it move along a spline. Basically it's a rocket with a smoke trail. The problem I'm having is that the particles seem to release in spurts every frame, rather than a continuous stream. Subframe Sampling is turned on, so that's not the problem. Is this something I can fix, or is it just a property of MAX particles?

amckay

01-20-2003, 11:40 PM

Although max 3+ are meant to have sub frame particle support, they actually don't. Particle Studio and Thinking Particles do, however that's not too helpful to you.

Your best bet is to give it a tiny bit of speed and a lot of variation in the speed, as well as motion inheritence and lots of variation in motion inheritence, this way you're breaking up the pattern and making some things move forward or slower than others to break up the gaps inbetween the particles.

It's a bit dodgy but obviously you have to make do with what you've got.

Cheers,

Allan McKay

Gilgamesh

01-21-2003, 12:04 AM

That's what I was afraid of. Oh well, I can deal with it. I've already got a lot of variation in speed, as well as lots of motion blur. ;)
Thanks for the help.

Aaron Moore

01-21-2003, 01:51 AM

bah... why won't Disceet fix this issue?!??!?

Chris Thomas

01-21-2003, 03:18 PM

maybe they are?

edaddy

01-21-2003, 03:25 PM

what u could do instead is link a particle cloud to your moving object, and set your 'object motion inheritence' (in the particle rollout) to 0. this way the particles won't just fly out but they will be left behind, they will essentially stay where they were born - leaving a nice trail

hope that helps

RJB

01-21-2003, 05:15 PM

You can also use the path follow space warp with particles.

gaggle

01-22-2003, 10:57 AM

Just an off-the-top-of-my-head idea, but maybe it would be possible to do the animation at half it's intended speed (or however slow is needed to ensure many frames the particles can be emitted on), then speeding that up in post?

It's a bit of a half-assed approch, and I'm not sure how well a speedup like that translates into nice frames in the end, etc etc. But, ah.. just a quick ponder..

Gilgamesh

01-22-2003, 09:59 PM

Yeah, I thought about that. I pretty much have it worked out with a lot of particle variation and motion blur. I don't have too much time to just experiment, but those are all good ideas. Thanks for the help.

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