particles : dispersion tests

[Dave Black]

Damn, Allan, that was impressive.

I'm assuming you're using the new particle flow extension?

I'd love to get my hands on that sucker. Gonna wait out for Max6 though. Thanks for sharing that.

-3DZ

:D

[amckay]

Hey yeah pflow, I've made a vid tut on how to do this without pflow a year ago, just standard paaray. So it's nothing special, the advantages to pflow are a more intuitive setup for control, as well as pflow being faster for this kind of stuff.

Here's a preview/playblast of it.
http://users.3dluvr.com/machette/wip/dispersion_wireframe.avi

[Dave Black]

Well, since I have never actually seen any documentation on pflow, I really don't know how to ask questions about it. I've used particle studio a bit, and understand that pflow is more event driven.

What strikes me about the animation, is the feeling that the particles are actually encountering air thickness. Like helical drafting and such. Is this an effect that pflow helps with, or am I just seeing a tweeked wind warp?

-3DZ

:D

[Dave Black]

I take that back. Now that I look at it again, does just look like a standard wind warp.

Sorry...don't usually use that many particles...nice effect, though. You actually made me start playing with high counts, and I'm amazed at what effects you can get...

Inspiring me again, Allan. :D

-3DZ

:D

[BrandonD]

Yeah, you'd be surprised what you can get with turbulence in a Wind space warp once you figure out the settings (ie start REALLY low).

[amckay]

Yep it's turbulence that really gives a lot of things life, you just need to sometimes apply two or three with different strengths and scales so you get a big wave with a smaller exponential curve that keeps curling ect.

All that's in the scene is a deflector and a wind spacewarp, oh and a teapot hidden... mustn't forget the teapot :)

[Dave Black]

A deflector? Hmmmm...

Hey Allan, how do you manage so many particles wth a deflector? I mean, in my experience, when you start pumping up the particle counts into the tens of thousands, deflection is almost impossible to render...that is to say, I've never let it go over night to see if it could do a frame.

I usually end up doing a blur effect by luminosity to thicken the particle mass, but in your test, it looks like just straight facing particles at either a high emmit rate, or more likely, a high total. Like somewhere in the 25000-50000 range.

Any pointers on how you managed to utilize that deflector on such a heavy scene?

:EDIT: Those numbers are just a guess...Thats about where I've had to put them to get such an effect. Rate at around 2500-5000, or total at around 30000. I could be dead wrong.

-3DZ

:D

[zarkos]

Could you send us a Max file, please. :bowdown:

[maxlover]

ohhh mann
why dont u write a tut on it. its grrrrr88888.

[gaggle]

Originally posted by 3DZealot
A deflector? Hmmmm...
Any pointers on how you managed to utilize that deflector on such a heavy scene?
Heyya 3DZ, I belive the way MAX handles these things is that it's only the first frame that requires intense calculations, the remaining frames will fly by rather fast.

It's kinda odd, but we've had several jobs here where the first frame took hours to calculate, but the remaining ones took minutes.

"first frame" being the first one processed by the MAX instance, so if you netrender the delay comes into play on each rendernode. With that in mind it can be an advantage to manually distribute large chunks of frames.

At least that's our experience.

[Ian Jones]

wow, thats secksy... very nice particles

[neods]

definetly nice, i'm a freak when it comes to particles.

[paulc]

First off let me say, thanks a lot for these tutorials, they're clear concise and extremely helpful. Pflow, when you first look at it, seems really daunting. But these really help to see some of the power of this tool.

Now for the stupid question. I've been looking at the dispersal tutorial and the problem is when I wire the wind to the particles (with exactly your settings,) I don't get that whispy look that you and others seem to get, everytrhing gets blown away very uniformly, no matter what wind settings I use
So I was wondering if there is something that I've missed, is it my unit setup or something like that. If anyone has any ideas it'd be great to hear them, as I've got a project on at work that calls for this wispy effect.

cheers.

[treed]

Allan, how long did that take you to render?

[treed]

Also, Allan your Groundcrackup1 movie doesen't play for me. Do I need divx 5.1 to play it?

[amckay]

treed - rendered in like 2 hours? I dunno, it was on my laptop I rendered that anim back in LA aaaages ago when I had a few days off between Tigarhare and DD..

paulc I guess check your unit scale. if your scale's too big then the turbulence won't be big enough. just play with the settings or switch scale to a smaller type and scene. it's all about playing to get the right feel to it eitherway.

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