3D tracking particles

#1

Hi all,

My work is letting me do some training in combustion for a project we’re working on and I have a question about tracking particles. How do I track particles in 3D space? For instance I want the particle system to be stationary and the camera to move.

I have an rpf render from max which is suposed to contain the camera position data.

When I place a particle system in the viewport and set the combustion camera to use the data from the rpf file the particle system just sits there in the viewport and doesn’t move. When I bring in tracking data for the location of where I want the particles or manually track them in combustion they assume the point in space is moving and trail behind it accordingly. While this tracks in 2D across the screen just fine the trailing effect won’t work for the effect we’re trying to achive.

Any help would be most appreciated.

-Mad

#2

Simple fact is Combustion only has 2d particles. The 3D Space in Combustion only relates to placemen/rotation/scale of 2d planes in 3d space.

-Eric

#3

I would love to see someone write a plugin which takes in a particle cache and creates a null object for each particle and animates the position and rotation data.

As long as there is a well documented syntax an exporter would be trivial to write for any particle system.

Here’s to hoping for a scripting language in Combustion 5.

#4

That could be achievable, once I figure out how to get rotation to work. I am working on a maxscript to export max object data as nulls, basically it builds a CWS with the data in it. However, the rotation stuff is giving me serious gimbal lock. Once I get the object exporter done then I will see what could be done with pflow support, maybe.

-Eric

#5

I’ve been looking for an excuse to write a Pflow Exporter. Let me know if you would like some help this is something I really would like to see happen.

#6

The big problem I could see with this is how many nulls Combustion can handle. Then what do you plan on doing with them?

-Eric

#7

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