Gurus you have got to work on this one ...

[Per-Anders]

You have options already in Cinema, try Storm Tracer, it does the same thing only with full sprites (which can be sized down to dots and set to static size without distance scaling too, and of course can sample surface color), I think that also in later versions of DiTools Remo added a dot rendering videopost. Your issue then only becomes one of how many particles Cinema can handle, though you can similarly resolve that by rendering in several goes and then compositinh together the results (takes a little bit of work, but basically you use the z depth of each pass to determine matting, whichever is closer/lighter gets the opacity).

[paulselhi]

when you say stormtracer can scale down to dots do you mean that they are still single polys, in which case trying to render a million would be an issue let alone 10 million

and ditools dot rendering, can it take shading on board ?

[AdamT]

The issue in Cinema isn't so much particle renerdering as it is the slowness of TP in general. It's dangerously slow with 50,000 particles, let alone 5 million.

[Per-Anders]

when you say stormtracer can scale down to dots do you mean that they are still single polys, in which case trying to render a million would be an issue let alone 10 million

and ditools dot rendering, can it take shading on board ?

Yes they are still single polygons, and nope, that's not an issue at all. Cinema on it's own can easily render several million polygons on a single gig of ram, Storm itself is in general capable of generating and rendering around 11million sprites per gig of ram (and it doesn't use Cinema's polygons or render engine, instead it uses it's own basic render engine to do so), HAIR is capable of rendering any number of it's own polygon strips (though it will slow down when you limit the amount of ram it may use).

The issue is nothing to do with that, it's to do with Thinking Particles using up much more memory than that and being very slow when dealing with millions of particles. Storm can general all over a surface and fake basic particle effects, random dispersion and flwoing along splines is pretty much it, so if you want more advanced windy effects then you either have to resort to deformers on a surface that storm is generating on (sometimes ok), or have Storm generate on particles, Storm can clone up to generate many more particles quickly for you, but it's limited in this case in that it's can't interpolate between existing particles, just random spreading around or l-system cloning.

I've no idea about the capabilities of DiTools dot post effect, you'd have to check Remo's site, all I remember was that there was some point where I think he added an effect to do this.

[paulselhi]

i would be interested to see stormtracer's versions of the examples i gave above. Particularly the first textured example and the ship blown away example.

If any one who is experienced with ST could have a go it would be interesting

[LucentDreams]

not sure how to do it with storm tracer, but for One night with the King they used simpler thinking particle setups and then using renderman the attached random clusters of 1000 RiPoints for each particle. that way a sim of say 1000 particles renders as a million indivual points.

[KsiKsu]

sure u can reach every goal with some tricks,,,,
u could even draw frame per frame 11 million particcles with a pencil on toilet paper
but thats not efficiently


and storm tracer seems to be dead

particles in cinema are like modelling in maya

[danb]

and a final one, i think it shows how well the particles pick up the detail of the emitting object

http://www.black-and-white-to-color.com/stuff/titren.mov



Wow that is very cool. I think i remember seeing an example similar to this done in ST. The example had a much less detailed object though.

I'd like to see something like this done too, and if it can be done it'd be nice to see an example, instead of just saying, yeah it can be done.

I know the sim itself can be done using TP or a real flow import, but the rendering would be interesting to see.

[danb]

How many particles are actually in that last render?

[govinda]

It looks like it's getting some of the 'Foom' effect from X-Men United. The next level up, to my utterly incomplete knowledge, is the kind of thing that the VFX guys did for the Patronus spell in Potter Order of the Phoenix, which was Houdini for (here's where someone will correct me) volume particles, Maya Fluids and a lot of great work in the Flame to mix the two. Now the Houdini capability would be a worthy goal. So you could say in a sense that these examples are chasing where the world was two years ago. But I'm discounting the skill of the compositors in creating the Patronus effects, and really it's always going to be one-half about how the layers are blended.

[pillemann]

http://www.black-and-white-to-color.com/stuff/titren.mov

wow, amazing movie. i would love make smth similar with c4d

[Per-Anders]

sure u can reach every goal with some tricks,,,,
u could even draw frame per frame 11 million particcles with a pencil on toilet paper
but thats not efficiently


and storm tracer seems to be dead

particles in cinema are like modelling in maya

What makes you think that particles in Cinema are that crap? TP is one of the most powerful particle systems out there, it's just not the easiest to use, MoGraph on the other hand is one of the easiest to use for specific tasks and can be combined with TP and the standard Cinema particle system for even more control and flexibility.

As one of the developers of Storm Tracer the news that it's dead is news to me!

Kai :- you do the same with Storm Tracer, as I mentioned you can clone in Storm Tracer and add random offset, but that's not useful for this particular situation unless you want a fluffy looking object!

[paulselhi]

The last ship render was 10 Million particles, parts calculated and saved to disk in 1.5 hours rendered in 30 mins single cpu 2.4 Ghz 1 GB RAM

I rendedred 10 passes of 1 million particles ( each pass has a slight offset to position speed setc) so with more memory you would probably only need to render say 2 or 3 passes.

You then create a loader which brings in all the particles at render time.

Disk space is an issue with 1 million particles taking around 20 MB per frame

[danb]

The last ship render was 10 Million particles, parts calculated and saved to disk in 1.5 hours rendered in 30 mins single cpu 2.4 Ghz 1 GB RAM

frame

That is really amazing. A 10 million particle sim in 1.5 hours. Did you have any particle interaction/dynamics?

[paulselhi]

only a deflector which passes down the ship causing them to change to a event that has wind tirbulence

[vbvcvj]

Wow, definatelly cool! Thanx for sharing. The only bad thing is that it is a Max plugin. :D

PS: found this thread, very interesting!
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=206&t=445722&page=1&pp=50

[paulselhi]

yeah i asked some questions there and i forget to mention i had used c4d in the pipeline..trees were definately climbed out off !!

[flingster]

can someone please explain to me why TP is slow?

per mentions ditools was a postfx if i remember rightly (di spdraw fx, didensity fx)..he also did some stuff with points showing in renders i'd have to go back and have another look. remo is bored of my unrealistic requests to make spore..i try :-) ...know its not in same league as st though. stormtracer from what i've seen certainly has results, speed and look..per whats difference between something like this and st? if you're using your own basic raytracer and all this type of massive particle quantity tools like spore/krakatoa do also then whats the difference? the data sets sizes and there manipulation and behaviours? what seem to me standard particle systems are fine...until you want many many million particles and they all grind to a halt..presumably its the development of specific tools for specific jobs and this is a case in point..

[velarde]

As one of the developers of Storm Tracer the news that it's dead is news to me!




Hello Per- Anders:

I was just checking the samples page for StormTracer and most of the cool looking movies have dead links ( Including the reel) ....

This is an example:

http://www.tools4d.com/StormTracer/Mike05.mov

Just wanted to let you know.

fjv

[paulselhi]

don't forget that my renders use max pflow, which is far more capable of handling millions of particles than c4d TP can

[bdjones]

Hello Per- Anders:

I was just checking the samples page for StormTracer and most of the cool looking movies have dead links ( Including the reel) ....

This is an example:

http://www.tools4d.com/StormTracer/Mike05.mov

Just wanted to let you know.

fjv

a quick google with the movie names and some are in peranders.com eg.

http://www.peranders.com/c4d8/samples/mov/disolvetest.mov

[stevester1]

One feature that Krakatoa is killer at is shading the particles, if I'm not mistaken, those millions of particles actually have shadows and the render doesn't get too affected.

As far as ST goes, I've gotten some great results, but like many, I'm limited by TP itself.

Areas where TP could improve to resemble Max's Pflow:
-Better particle object generators (when generating particles from an object's surface, this is MUCH easier, simpler, and better looking in Max than in C4D
-Particle geometry collision detection
-Handle more particles
-Caching
-Dynamic view port refreshing

Areas where ST could improve to resemble Krakatoa:
-Shading (I think Krakatoa can even use projection maps from other geometry, and UV's and such...)
-Lighting
-Caching and re-loading with variants


As far as your request goes Paul, if you feel like sending me the geometry you would like to test with ST, I'd be more than welcome to.

[Per-Anders]

One feature that Krakatoa is killer at is shading the particles, if I'm not mistaken, those millions of particles actually have shadows and the render doesn't get too affected.

As far as ST goes, I've gotten some great results, but like many, I'm limited by TP itself.

Areas where TP could improve to resemble Max's Pflow:
-Better particle object generators (when generating particles from an object's surface, this is MUCH easier, simpler, and better looking in Max than in C4D
-Particle geometry collision detection
-Handle more particles
-Caching
-Dynamic view port refreshing

Areas where ST could improve to resemble Krakatoa:
-Shading (I think Krakatoa can even use projection maps from other geometry, and UV's and such...)
-Lighting
-Caching and re-loading with variants


As far as your request goes Paul, if you feel like sending me the geometry you would like to test with ST, I'd be more than welcome to.

Just to respond to each thing in order

TP :
- I'll agree on the worklow, it's true Matterwaves is not as instantly accessible as just selecting an obejct and creating an emitter, but it is pretty flexible and powerful with it's texture controls and it doesn't get that much easier than using the TP presets, or MoGraph to generate TP on surfaces, plus you have several other ways of generating TP on surfaces using XPresso for flexibility.
- I think you meant to say full geometry particle collisions, as TP has particle geometry and particle particle collisions, just not using their full geometry for it.
- It handles up to 10 million particles, you do have to set that up in the TP Manager settings though, as the default is only i think 100k, it is however quite slow and memory intensive when you get a lot
- Caching is actually possible to an extent using MoGraph and the Bake Tag, however it wont cache everything, just the basic Matrices etc.
- I've no idea what you mean here, you have a number of ways to preview stuff directly in viewport with TP, changing the render style from the manager settings and of course viewing objects from the TP Geometry object or (faster) the MoGraph Cloner objects. But maybe you mean something else?

Storm Tracer
- It already has full shading from Cinema's shading system, you can shade it however you want, taking up color from surface textures, particles, different texture spaces, projections (using the projector), you do need to know Cinema's texture system though. If you're sampling from an objects surface it will use whatever UV maps or textures you've set up however you wanted them to be set up on that surface, or maybe that's not what you meant?
- It already supports lighting and shadows (via the shadow tag) and has two illumination models built in (and allows you to use further via shaders), is there something in particular you're missing in lighting?
- Caching also doesn't make much sense in Storm, so I'm really not sure what you want to cache exactly, it wont get any faster. You can already use and strore variants and presets in the Storm Library, so again i'm not quite following.

[stevester1]

Hey per, you misunderstood me on a few, but corrected me on some points so thanks, ain't no better advise than pro advise haha:

-Matter waves, you nailed it, I just find it a little bothersome, in max, it's pretty much drag and drop.
-Yes I did mean full geometry collision, but I think Remo is working on a plug in to correct that?
-Yes it does handle quite a lot of particles, I've used up to 1.5 million once for a sandstorm, but it is a memory hog (I'm using 2 gigs)
-Caching: it would be nice to have full caching possible
-View port refreshing: I don't know how to explain this, but if my time line marker isn't on the first frame of my animation and I make changes to my TP settings, I usually have to scrub back to frame 0 and play again.

-For the shading, I meant shading like this: http://support.franticfilms.com/images/10/krakatoa.jpg
if Storm can do this, please tell me how, I have a shot that would kill for this effect haha
-On lighting you corrected me, thank you
-You corrected me on caching, I got confused here, since Krakatoa caches the particles , whereas storm doesn't really "generate or handle" the particles, it simply renders them.

Anyways, thanks for clearing some stuff up, sorry I wasn't clear from the get-go.

[Per-Anders]

Hi, on the TP viewport refreshing it will update, but you do need to just change the frame (then wait for it to update all the way through) you don't acutally need to play through it manually yourself, it would be better if it updtes automatically though for sure.

For Storm Shading, yes, that's surface sampling, it will just sample the surface that it comes from, to use it just turn on surface sampling in the color channel and use the storm shader set to surface color. The quickstart docs cover the settings, the only tricky thing is then hiding the surface as the particles move away from it so it appears the surface is breaking up, of course the simplest way is to just use the multipass for this.

[stevester1]

Hi, on the TP viewport refreshing it will update, but you do need to just change the frame (then wait for it to update all the way through) you don't acutally need to play through it manually yourself, it would be better if it updtes automatically though for sure.

For Storm Shading, yes, that's surface sampling, it will just sample the surface that it comes from, to use it just turn on surface sampling in the color channel and use the storm shader set to surface color. The quickstart docs cover the settings, the only tricky thing is then hiding the surface as the particles move away from it so it appears the surface is breaking up, of course the simplest way is to just use the multipass for this.

Thanks! didn't know that

[marcorabellini]

View port refreshing: I don't know how to explain this, but if my time line marker isn't on the first frame of my animation and I make changes to my TP settings, I usually have to scrub back to frame 0 and play again.

You don't need to go all the way to the begining to refresh TP, just one frame. It will take time to refresh depending on the complexity and where it is in the timeline. You can watch the progress in the little info pallet. It will say "Animating Scene..." with a progress bar. I think it internally goes back to the begining and recalculates, but since it isn't refreshing the view every frame it's a bit faster.

If you need to see the exact same frame, first go ahead one frame and then back one frame (G, F on the keyboard).

Also, there's a preference (Preferences>Common>Recalculate Scene on Rewind) that needs to be turned on for this to work.

[LucentDreams]

Thanks! didn't know that
not a fancy care with a lot more detail but there has always been an example of this on the website

http://www.thirdpartyplugins.com/stormtracer/movies/PStormVsn01.mov

[Mauritius]

It handles millions of particles with ease as they are only points, generally you would render 2-4 million particles and then use a clever technique where krakatoa can render out mutiple sets of particle systems each with an offset for velocity, force etc. So 10 million + particles are easy

Er, you can render millions of particles just as you describe (and fast and with a low memory footprint), using PRMan, 3Delight or Pixie since years. Pixie is even free. Including full 3D motion blur. Check out this site (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Feldman-2003-ASP/index.html) that has examples of explosions made entirely out of particles.

.mm

[stevester1]

Er, you can render millions of particles just as you describe (and fast and with a low memory footprint), using PRMan, 3Delight or Pixie since years. Pixie is even free. Including full 3D motion blur. Check out this site (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Feldman-2003-ASP/index.html) that has examples of explosions made entirely out of particles.

.mm

Yeah but not many of us have access to the C4D->RIB Exporter

[JoelOtron]

not a fancy care with a lot more detail but there has always been an example of this on the website

http://www.thirdpartyplugins.com/stormtracer/movies/PStormVsn01.mov

And here's a quick tutorial by Felix Roth. (My apoplogies to Felix for posting)

http://mrmv-server.de/roth-gfx/oberfl/oberfl.html

This only works if you render a sequence from 0. Rendering a single frame (to test the effect) will not work--unless I had missed something.

@per--I too was under the impression that ST was no longer available to purchase--was happily surprised to see your site and forum was still up with good examples. I guess since I purchased from Paul, and since he no longer is in the plugin selling biz (AFAIK) I didnt think about it much afterwards.

If at some point I wished to upgrade to the NET version--would I need to purchase from the ground level from you--or is there a way to upgrade my current license--which was thru Paul? Paul made it clear that he is no longer involved with ST purchases--at least I BELIEVE that was the case--so much to keep track of these days! Thanks.

[benytone]

not a fancy care with a lot more detail but there has always been an example of this on the website
http://www.thirdpartyplugins.com/stormtracer/movies/PStormVsn01.mov
No, that's only particle's birth at the source



not a fancy care with a lot more detail but there has always been an example of this on the..
http://support.franticfilms.com/images/10/krakatoa.jpg


looks like Houdini's new sand/Gas solver


Ciao
.

[Per-Anders]

The example Kai was pointing out was showing color taken from object surface at birth (essentially the same thing as the car example which has a lot of particles born on the surface of the car mesh and taking their color from the surface), how many you make and what they do from then on is of course totally up to you.

[stevester1]

No, that's only particle's birth at the source





looks like Houdini's new sand/Gas solver


Ciao
.


It's Krakatoa for 3dsmax, but I'm sure Houdini would accomplish it without much difficulty.

As for Storm, maybe it's just my experience lacking, but I would personally have a hard time recreating the car scene, if I could recreate it of course.

The particles look so fine and as you can obviously see, there's a whole lot of them.

[KsiKsu]

As one of the developers of Storm Tracer the news that it's dead is news to me!


Look at your page, there is no storm tracer example movie or showreel online
error 404
http://www.thirdpartyplugins.com/stormtracer/
and the information on the page is totally outdated, speaking from c4d R8.5 and 9
dated with 2004, etc
many dead links to pages that are dead etc


And Look at the old solid spline thread which mentioned:

I`ll do one last act of good will and reply to any storm serial update requests on my old email addy which contain the special top secret codeword ...
"pleasesendmeanewstormserialforr10andillbuyyouabee r nexttimeiseeyouhonestmate"
only mail with this top seceret code will get a reply "


or just look at www.tools4d.com (http://www.tools4d.com)
dead too

Instead of sending a R10 Stormtracer Serial newsletter to all registered customers, writing hidden in a single cgtalk post that u can get a new serial by "pleasesendmeanewstormserialforr10andillbuyyouabee r nexttimeiseeyouhonestmate"
Is this professional?

That all looks very unprofessional and dubious, why should i spent a lot of money for a product that could disappear in a few days.

Stormtracer seems for to be burried deep under the ground
I Think stormtracer was very cool,
but using a plugin that s future not save and that use hidden posts as information platforms..........

A PLugin is nothing worth without continous developing and adapting to new Core Package versions and good support.
Thats like gambling 50 % : 50 %

:scream: and if its not dead ?! then change something on your marketing strategy,
come out of the darkness:deal:



cheers

[Per-Anders]

Ah yes you're right, the website for Storm has not been updated once I had to change servers, though it's content apart from the dead links is all still relevant even if it does make reference to older versions of C4D. Nothing you have said though (no matter how self righteously) changes the fact that Storm Tracer is not dead.

Your other thread and comments are about Paul Everett and his website. Please read the thread and what he wrote there (and understand exactly why he could do no more). In defense of what he was saying plugin development for C4D is a small thing, not undertaken by corporations but by individuals and usually with an exceptionally small userbase that the developers know each customer individually and the customers know the developers, it's normal for people to act in a familiar way in that environment. If you were expecting and hoping for this to be a cold corporate business where plugin developers could afford to employ others for marketing, then I'm sorry it's just not that way.

It's of course up to you how you spend your money, you can even feel free to tell the world about how you're not spending your money. Others have spent theirs on Storm and for many of them its earnt it's keep many times over, you use the right tool for the job and for hem Storm has been the right tool. A plugin like any other software is worth exactly what it does for you, nothing else. I'm sorry that you feel my support for Storm Tracer is not sufficient.

[Bobo]

The example Kai was pointing out was showing color taken from object surface at birth (essentially the same thing as the car example which has a lot of particles born on the surface of the car mesh and taking their color from the surface), how many you make and what they do from then on is of course totally up to you.

This was not the case with the car - the example that was shown actually colored the particles by projecting a Brazil r/s rendering onto them, not by "stealing" the color from the emitter's surface.

What we did was taking the world space position of each particle on the first frame and baking it into a map channel to be used on later frames by the camera projection. The particles would move in space but still read the color from the correct image pixel corresponding to the original world space position on each frame. In a way, they were "pretending" to the camera mapping to still reside on the original position while being somewhere else completely. Of course, the camera projection was also animated, so the particles could change their color over time - see for example the reflections/specular highlights. Here is a WIP animation of the shot:
http://www.franticfilms.com/software/support/krakatoa/downloads/CPember_MiniCooper_siggraph06.mov

You can find more WIP shots on this page:
http://www.franticfilms.com/software/support/krakatoa/work_in_progress_gallery.php

When we started working on particle rendering back in 2004, we tried to use Entropy / Renderman for this purpose and the results were nice but SLOW - most renderers are not optimized to work with points. For the movie "Stay", Richard Dr. Baily generated designs which we had to render with motion blur and depth of field in a reasonable time, with each frame of the 50+ shots containing around 500 million particles.
You can see some frames from that old movie here:
http://www.franticfilms.com/vfx/projects/view_project/?id=28

Krakatoa is a further development of the renderer we wrote for that show and it can draw about 1.5 million particles per second (not taking into account the loading of the data, just the pure drawing speed). It does not force you to cache particles on disk, but allows you to. You can render straight from Particle Flow or Thinking Particles, but if you move to another frame, you would have to wait for the system to preroll which can take orders of magnitude longer than what Krakatoa needs to draw the frame. Thus, saving to disk and then rendering any frame with different lighting and shading settings makes more sense. In addition, the loader object allows you to deform the particles or cull particles using arbitrary volumes so it has an added bonus. For fast turnarounds, you can also keep the last frame in RAM and render again and again to adjust density or lighting without reloading at all.

For some very basic introduction to Krakatoa, you can watch the Camtasia videos posted here:
http://www.studiodaily.com/main/news/feed.rss/8500.html
They only scratch the surface though.

The following frames from the Red Sun explosion in Superman Returns contained 700 million particles (but these were rendered in multiple passes since we did not have 64 bit machines nor enough RAM in those days):

http://www.franticfilms.com/images/vfx/content/vfx_home_1.jpg

http://www.franticfilms.com/images/vfx/content/vfx_home_2.jpg

http://www.franticfilms.com/images/vfx/content/vfx_home_3.jpg

[Per-Anders]

Hi Bobo (and welcome to the C4D forum), thank-you for posting, a very interesting and enlightening post with some impressive figures! :)

[benytone]

Hi Bobo
I just want to say, Wow! looks amazing...:buttrock:



.

[AdamT]

I want to saw welcome and wow too. Also, how's the Cinema plugin coming? :)

[Bobo]

Hi Bobo
I just want to say, Wow! looks amazing...:buttrock:
.

Thanks!

Before the question comes (EDIT: While I was typing this, the question actually came!) - while the Krakatoa version we are selling is specifically for 3ds Max, the Krakatoa we used on most of these movies (Stay, Cursed, Superman Returns etc.) was a stand-alone renderer controlled by XML files and fed by particle sequence files or Doc Baily's procedural Spore designs (one of the reasons we do have disk caching is that we had to move the particles from our 3D applications to the stand-alone renderer!).

So, in theory, any 3d application could be connected with Krakatoa with some amount of work. But the truth is that Krakatoa for Max is as much a renderer as it is a particle management and manipulation solution with a significant amount of additional functionality, utilities and workflows that are currently Max-specific and would require a lot of programming and knowledge of the target platforms to port to C4D, Maya or XSI. Thus, at this point we have not commited to porting Krakatoa or providing a connection with the stand-alone version to any other 3D application.

Also, it appears that some of the particle systems available out there have not been designed to drive vast amounts of particles (at least Maya and Thinking Particles appear to have difficulties with millions of particles). In fact, even Particle Flow in Max wasn't specifically designed to work with that many particles - it ships with a default system limit of 100K particles but it can be increased easily. I personally am curious to see what the new XSI particle system will be capable of.

Btw, the next update of Krakatoa is expected to reduce memory consumption per particle. Krakatoa 1.0.1 can fit 28.25 million particles in one Gig of RAM, or in other words, one million particles require 36.2 MB of RAM. In 1.1.0, we expect it to be able to fit two to three times as many particles into memory depending on the usage of certain features and channels.

[JustinB]

Hi Bobo

Thanks for posting the very interesting facts and images on your use of particles. It's beautiful to see millions of particles at work!

Cheers
Justin

[vbvcvj]

Also, it appears that some of the particle systems available out there have not been designed to drive vast amounts of particles (at least Maya and Thinking Particles appear to have difficulties with millions of particles). .



Sad to know that, hope Maxon could address that problem and someone could port this amazing plug to C4D....

[LucentDreams]

while it would be great if maxon improved their particle handling, I think it more likely that krakatoa would be ported if Frantic had need for it, or at least someone with the cinema SDK knowledge for it. As Bobo said, they've developed the plugin for max thats not jsut the renderer but also the paticle manager, theres no reason they couldn't ddo that same in cinema, but as he said they just don't know the app well enough or have good need themselves to spend the man hours and money on it.

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