CGTalk - xpresso buttons to change scene from day to night?

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Mike Hooma

01-31-2003, 04:08 AM

I was wondering if its possible using xpresso to have a few buttons like dawn, day, night. when i push one it changes the sky material, the g.i. box, and luminance on sprites, and turns appropriate lights on/off?

*unrequired reading*
also with tp particles i'm using pborn 'count' of 18000 so i expect at all times there would be 18000 sprites out but it puts a few out each frame, and annoyingly they are created at the world centre and displayed for 2 frames before being placed on the terrain??
is there any way I can turn the sprite particles into objects?

thanks for any help,
mike

Per-Anders

01-31-2003, 04:24 AM

ok in reverse order

sprite particles are objects, you just need to make the tp geometry object editable then you will have millions and millions fo particles, (or at least 16000).

to make particles go exactly where you want before anything happesn don't use a ppass to get them there, instead place them from teh particle birth output from teh pstorm or pbirth or whatever node.

you would need to use a birth mode of "Shot" to get all the particles out on frame 0.

you could use user data fields that were bool data fields, then they would give you tick boxes, you could use xpresso to then turn on/off lights depending on which box was ticked and set the parameters of the gradient in the sky object (or switch on and off different sky objects with different parameters) thus getting the look you want. it's possible i think. good luck :)

Mike Hooma

01-31-2003, 05:02 AM

thanks thats a great help!

i'll post a pic of the xpresso when i make it if you are interested, have you mastered xpresso yet?
is there anyway to place particles based on texture? if not there really should be!

AdamT

01-31-2003, 05:07 AM

Originally posted by Mike Hooma
thanks thats a great help!

i'll post a pic of the xpresso when i make it if you are interested, have you mastered xpresso yet?
is there anyway to place particles based on texture? if not there really should be!

I believe TDEM can place particles by texture, and TP should have that ability when Maxon releases the first point upgrade which will include TP's MatterWaves. Hopefully that upgrade will be available within the next few weeks.

Mike Hooma

01-31-2003, 05:31 AM

but can u place particles on polys in a natural way like with tp?

thanks for the info on matterwave, what is matterwave? from what i read ages ago I thought it had been superseded by tp?

JoshM

01-31-2003, 06:24 AM

Matterwaves is a material mapped particle system, which means that you can emit particles based on texture map. There is a lot more control in Matterwaves then just emitting particles you can also control the particles life, death, distance etc., which just adds extreme control over particles.

Matterwaves was intergrated into Thinking Particles, but the actual Matterwaves software contains some more features then the TP Matterwaves.

-Josh-

Mike Hooma

02-02-2003, 01:50 AM

on my first attempt with the xpresso setup I ran into an irritating bug...

i duplicated the original sky object which had 3 textures on it. then using multi select I deleted the duplicate texture tags so that each sky had a different texture. now those 3 texture tags don't map back to the correct material, reapplying the textures doesn't fix it and they also change to different materials when i try to compensate.
edit: also the sky appears correct in the editor (renders differently)

when i get registered I'll send the file to maxon...

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