Change colour of particles

#1

hello,

i am very new to particle flow. I just have a very basic understanding of it eventhough i am confident with max and animating in it itself. right now i am just trying to create a sphere that spawns particles that die after a short while I have done that but than i tried now for a long time to animate the colour on the particles but fail :frowning: as i said i am really knew to partcile flow.
I also try to get a nice turbulence or distortion ot the partciles, i tried to achieve it with a wind but the effects looks rather bad, i am not sure if this is the way to do it … in addition i use krakatoa as well but just for rendering my understanding of it is even less tham basic … unfortunately there are not alot of tutorials out for partcile flow and krakatoa so i hope some body here can help me :slight_smile: i would really appreciate it :slight_smile:

regards and thanks,
pradjan

#2

Read about Particle Age map, one caveat you’ll need to add a delete operator to the global event and set it to the duration of the timeline to initialize the particles lifespan channel or set it with a script operator.

Use the Betterwind spacewarp, it has more noise options and proper falloffs.

#3

Thanks for the reply. That helps me a lot. For the time being I just used a Standart Map that changes colours and added that in the scene through Matreial Dynamic. I will definately try the Particle Age Map out and Motion Blur is really nice as well :slight_smile:

Here is a Previs of what I am doing right now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32uv7qeDen0

It is the first thing I ever did with Particle Flow. There are so many thing that I want to change. Is there a good way to make the particles appear like dust or just softer? I know that a lot of people use FumeFX but I think I do not have anough time to learn how to use it, I hope there is another way to make it look more professional.

Regards,
Pradjan

#4

That’s pretty cool :slight_smile: If I can offer a couple pointers:

Looks like your using Voxel mode to bring up your density (make your particle looks bigger) I personally would not take this approach. Instead bring up you particle counts, by a minimum of 10x, then make the voxel size smaller, this will improve the look dramatically. IF you bring the count up higher it is even possible to forgo Voxel mode and use Particle rendering mode, it is quite a bit faster and give much more finite detail without the cost of speed.

After increasing your counts, save the system out to a PRT sequence and reload it with a PRT loader, you’ll get better memory usage and typically less time spent prepping each frame at render time. Since PFlow is only single threaded, do the PFlow calc only once when saving to PRT or when making scene changes.

Since you have now saved out to PRT you have the whole Krakatoa Channels Modifier (KCM) workflow at your disposal. You can for instance use the Emission Channel to self-illuminate your particles by color/density/speed, simply change colors/positions/ect., nearly no limits.

#5

thank you so much for your reply, i feel so lost in particle flow and krakatoa, i just started again to concentrate on this module as I had some deadline and presentation in between :frowning: I tried out what you said and I noticed too that the particles are quite big I checked the mode i am rendering and it is particle mode and not voxel mode, i tried though voxel mode out and when I make the partcles really small it takes a really long time and the result with particle flow mode is much nicer, but I increased the amount of particles to 1million it looks better now but still quite “big”

The main problem is the prt loader I had a look in several tutorials but I just don get it :frowning: I cant find the options for emissions and colour etc. I managed to save the prt and to load it too, but no options that I understamd really :frowning: I change the emission though in the main controls and it gives it a glowing effect which looks really cool, I still wish that I could make it more look like fume :frowning: btw I made another ident which is more an animation with effects it got a lot of mistakes, mostly animation and rendering mistakes that I need to fix just takes so long to render out with the grass modifier, and comments are highly appreciated :smiley:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU_r3BfSME0

kind regards,
pradjan

#6

I am posting this from my phone, so i cannot make you an example scene.

I ca try to explain a little.

Select your prt loader now goto to the modifier drop donw and add a Krakatoa Channels Modifier.

Within this modifier you will find a schematic editor to which you can adjust all of your included particle data channels.

So for an easy example, if you wan to use emission you can give the emission the same color as your particles color by creating a input channel(color) and wire it directly to the output. Know select the ouput by clicking on it, scroll down to the channels list and change the channel to Emission.

Now open the Krakatoa UI, make sure emission is enabled, and hit render

Yours particles emission color should be the same color as your particles if you did it correctly.

You can for instance add another KCM to the stack below the emission KCM you just created and controls the particles colors.

Open the new KCM’s Magma-Flow editor. Add a new input channel (color) a new vector ( this will be your second color) make its color black.

Now add a new blend function and wire the vector black to input 1 and wire the particle color to input 2. Create another new input channel (density) and wire it to the blend amount.

Now render it should give you black particles on the outside and more color in towards the core.

There are a ton of great tutorial examples likes this in the online help. Give them a look through :slight_smile:

#7

thank you again for your reply :slight_smile: unfortunately i am not smart enough for krakatoa :frowning: the good thing is I found out why the particles are so huge, it was because my resolution was 640 x 480 and that made it somehow big I changed it to 1440 x 1024 so it looks a lot more professional. about the prt load. I did what you said but nothing changed, it did not had any effect on the particles :frowning: really so frustrating to be so limited to due to my own sikills :frowning: I could not find an option were I could pick the colour eventhough I exactly made what you described. I will try to figure it out tonight. If I cant make I unfortunately have to leave it as my deadline is very soon and the second logo ident is very unfinshed :frowning: :frowning:

#8

I won’t be home until tomorrow evening, I can post an example then.

Even without changing the vectors color, I believe the default is black anyway you should see something unless of course you density is too low to give you a noticable change, to test for that just swap the blend inputs so input 1 is now the particle color and input 2 is the vector.

You can also use the Particle data viewer to see what values/numbers your particles contain in each channel, this is very useful. Since the Blend function amount works between 0.0 and 1.0 if your density is too far to one end or the other not much blending will occur.

#9

Well you will have to forgive me for posting a Krakatoa workflow from memory. Here is an example of what I was talking about. The density is generated by a simple box#3 operator, an important thing that I had missed. If you don’t have box#3 you can use (with a different but still interesting result) the age and lifespan to base the emission off of. So the younger the brighter. It is pretty much the setup you will find in the help.

#10

hello,
many many thanks for your replies :slight_smile: I was not able to use the PRT Loader for my submission but I will definately take your advices and use it :slight_smile: i really appreciate all the help you really changed my view about particles. i think i start to really like it, it is just so complicated specially in contrast to modelling but it is very intersting and astonishing what is possible within particle flow and specially krakatoa ^^ again thank you :slight_smile:

kind regards,
pradjan

#11

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