hypervoxels vs thinking particles ??(pyro/metaballs)

[DeathCarrot]

from what ive heard is that hypervoxels are not limited like pyrocluster (i.e. to only fire and smoke), they can produce much much better volumetric effects... but this is just what ive heard ive never tried them myself.. :shrug:

[Per-Anders]

ok, firstly, TP is more powerful than Lightwaves particle system in mos areas, you can do basic fluids simulation with TP just as you can in Lightwaves, but it doesn't have as many deflector types as lightwaves does, stuff like lightwave has one that allows particles to stick ot teh surface and travel around the surface as a flow field before falling off at a certain angle either according to gravity (i.e. they go around the surface then drop off the bottom) or accorsing to inertia. However apart from that it pretty much trounces lightwaves particle system on every count.

As for Hypervoxels versus Pyrocluster. Well the simple deal here is, with hypervoxels, if you know how ot use lightwaves material system, then you already know how to use hypervoxels pretty much. You can think of hypervoxels like metaballs, but with insane displacement maps, and one extra parameter for control for density... not to mention the ability to render very fast as sprites with any number of "slices" and the ability to realtime preview the sprites in the viewport as you're working on your scene/model.

Hypervoxels allow you to combine different groups of particles/objects too, additive, or subtractive etc , and their different textures will blend if they're brought into the same hypervoxel group (which is to say many different types of hypervoxels can be in one hypervoxel group, and each type of hypervoxel could beapplied to a different object), of course the blending between textures is rather yummy.

Then Hypervoxels can use verteces to place the "voxels" which means for insance it's very easy with Hypervoxels to simply model a furry creature just by putting Hypervoxels on that object.

Hypervoxels allow you to use any material channel on a voxel, for instance transparency so you can have bubbles or glass or frost. It's very very powerful, and it allows you to use any inbuilt channel material, for instance the SLA noise, you're not limited to jsut the inbuilt noise patterns, or inbuilt gradients.

Hypervoxels is way more powerful and easy ot use than pyrocluster... oh and it also renders faster. But hopefully sometime someone else might create a decent voxel system for Cinema (i.e. one that people will actually use).

[flingster]

ok guys thanks for that i think i got it now. i like the sounds of particles sticking to surfaces and falling off according to inertia...sounds rather cool.

so does this mean really that it would be a materials system overhaul in order to achieve hypervoxels properties in cinema? cos you can use objects etc as particles in cinema (groups) etc and texturing....obviously it not so flexible by the sounds of it and you don't get texture mixing etc and fur etc. can you just clear up for me then "what is a voxel"? eh heh..
thanks again

mdme_sadie: by the way just took a look at your middle earth entry and i love that fairy looks wicked.:thumbsup:

[Per-Anders]

thanks... as for your questions

well the thing is a voxel is not really just any particle. it's actually avolumetrically rendered point. so when we talk about voxels we mean balls of volumetric effects. like pyrocluster.

the toruble is not cinemas own material systme which is in need of an update, but the fact that pyrocluster totally ignores the inbuilt material system. if it used the inbuilt material system then perhaps things would be different, but it doesn't and it's extremely limited.

you can emit any object as a aprticle using tp, but volumetric objects aren't so good in cinema. pyrocluster has no way of dealing with "groups" or blending different pyrocluster particle sets together, it doesn't work in teh metaball fashion which allows for far more organic shapes. it can't do transparency like glass, it can't do sprites...there's no viper equivalent that allows you to do low res tests of the voxels at high speed with pyrocluster, instead it allows you to see one particle alone, not in teh scene, and not even on the object it's applied to, you can't animate teh preview, and it's woefully inadequate for more things... sadly pyrocluster seems to be our only choise at this point in time :(... it's just a terribly badly implemented system, it may be fine for max users who only demand that they never be able to fully understand a plugin (i.e. it's incomprehensible), but quite apart form that, it's that its' so underpowered as to be almost laughable, and so difficult to control as to have you tearing your hair out... i certainly don't have hte patience to try and work out how ot do a single tongue of flame in pyrocluster (a breeze with hypervoxels).

[michaeli]

Originally posted by mdme_sadie
thanks... as for your questions

well the thing is a voxel is not really just any particle. it's actually avolumetrically rendered point. so when we talk about voxels we mean balls of volumetric effects. like pyrocluster.

the toruble is not cinemas own material systme which is in need of an update, but the fact that pyrocluster totally ignores the inbuilt material system. if it used the inbuilt material system then perhaps things would be different, but it doesn't and it's extremely limited.

you can emit any object as a aprticle using tp, but volumetric objects aren't so good in cinema. pyrocluster has no way of dealing with "groups" or blending different pyrocluster particle sets together, it doesn't work in teh metaball fashion which allows for far more organic shapes. it can't do transparency like glass, it can't do sprites...there's no viper equivalent that allows you to do low res tests of the voxels at high speed with pyrocluster, instead it allows you to see one particle alone, not in teh scene, and not even on the object it's applied to, you can't animate teh preview, and it's woefully inadequate for more things... sadly pyrocluster seems to be our only choise at this point in time :(... it's just a terribly badly implemented system, it may be fine for max users who only demand that they never be able to fully understand a plugin (i.e. it's incomprehensible), but quite apart form that, it's that its' so underpowered as to be almost laughable, and so difficult to control as to have you tearing your hair out... i certainly don't have hte patience to try and work out how ot do a single tongue of flame in pyrocluster (a breeze with hypervoxels).

Wow, hope the pyro be better in the next version, I heard that Maxon will develop new versions for these cebas plugins.

[flingster]

mdme_sadie: cheers, surely it would be better for maxon to just can pyro. Then come up with something to replace it with the sort of capabilities that hypervoxels has cos it sounds "very flexible" and "very user friendly/controlable", almost perfect tool for that sort of work. Apart from lightwaves hypervoxels how the hell does the competition deal with this sort of thing, are they also lacking in this area?

michaeli: where did you hear about maxon developing pyro? and more info?

[michaeli]

Sorry for my mistake, it should be "Maxon will update it, maybe in cooperation with cebas."
http://www.postforum.com/forums/read.php?f=6&i=69273&t=69271

[Bucko]

Does anybody know why on earth MAXON doesn't allow PyroCluster materials on nulls? A simple fix for MAXON I am shure and it would make the creation of cloudscapes, forests etc much easier.

Btw is there a plug in etc that will let nulls/objects control particles position/orientation.
Something like this:
I have a group whose children are nulls (or any object if you prefer that). The plugin would use a given emitter and control its particles to have the same pos/orientation as the children of the group and the number of children of the group would control the number of visible particles.

Would this be doable in Coffee/TP? Anybody?

(I write like a Japanse when low on caffeine, sorry about that)

[JoshM]

Btw is there a plug in etc that will let nulls/objects control particles position/orientation.
Something like this:
I have a group whose children are nulls (or any object if you prefer that). The plugin would use a given emitter and control its particles to have the same pos/orientation as the children of the group and the number of children of the group would control the number of visible particles.

Would this be doable in Coffee/TP? Anybody?

(I write like a Japanse when low on caffeine, sorry about that)

This would be possible with COFFEE, but the easiest way to achieve this effect would probably be through Thinking Particles. You would assign both the Parent particles to one group and the child particles to another group. You would get the particle info from the child group and then assign the alignment of the child group to the parent group.

-Josh-

[flingster]

michaeli: cheers....was curious.:thumbsup:

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