Little Particle Thread

#1

I realized that things get quickly deluded within a thread, therefore I’ve decided to isolate the particle section from the big “2.4b update” thread. I’ve posted a bunch of example clips and a little freshly baked demo scene just for you…you might take it and see what you can learn from it already. Particularely emitter and random settings as well as ParticleShader settings and how other shaders hook into it!

Most unusual is the use of the gradient, because behind your back we made it possible, that a shader node that the gardient hooks into can also control what the gradient receives, so you just need to connect it through the input of the ParticleShader (color in this case) and it will consider the gradient to be walked through by the particles age!

Anyway, here are a few clips, which courteously are currently hosted by Nichod…
messiah:Studio Particle Clips
…in case his site changes and you’d like to see them still…
ParticleClips (7Mb Zip)

And here’s a demo scene for you to play with…
Particle Smoke Demo (right click save as)

There, that should do it! :slight_smile:

Taron

#2

Cool, thanks very much.

#3

Bubbles_large.fxs (right click save as)

#4

Wow cool

thanks Taron !!! :thumbsup:

Im going to try this …

#5

Thanks again Taron.

#6

Excellent!

#7

cooooool…:drool:

#8

thank you!

#9

What codec are those clips in?

Thanks.

#10

How long did the particle renders take? What were the machine stats?

Looking for how easily the renderer might be used in a production environment.

#11

DivX 5.0 is the codec of the Assorted Particle Clips.

#12

Just run the little demo scenes and you’re getting an idea. On my dual opteron some of them rendered between under a second and 10seconds. The underwater one was the slowest climbing up to I think 6minutes at the worst but only a few seconds in the beginning of course. On this one I also just used one particle system for all the steam, using an object as emitter which had only polygons where the vents are placed. Kind of a nice way of doing that!

Currently using several particle systems slow down the renders a lot as soon as they intersect. The particle rendering concept, which I’m actually really proud of, introduced a different way of dealing with the render pipeline and we’re about to implement it on a larger scale. At first it will cover multiple systems and intersecting transparent geometry and in a second step we’ll see to explore the use beyond that as well!

William Eggington has already used it in production, I believe. But maybe he’ll tell us more about it. I’m wondering where he is right now, feels like I havn’t seen a post from him in a few?!

Anyway…experiment with the particles, explore their abilities! It’s a lot of fun and leads to a lot of very unusual effects. I’ve added a system in the shading that adjusts the particles coordinate systems based on proximity to each other or the particles of a different system. It’s pretty crazy. I’ve used it on the comic_fire. Those are two systems, while the first one is the flame part and the second one the smoke. Yet the second one modulates the first one as it rushes by. Really crazy stuff.

#13

Hi Taron,
i have problems to download your scene examples…
The requested URL /*taron/DemoScenes/smoke01.fxs was not found on this server.

Thank you
ADL
adl@imagonet.it

#14

I’m here. I just had to fight a little battle with the management here at CGTalk. We lost our Front Page status for a little while there. Not cool.

Yea I used particles on a film project a few weeks back. It was a rush job so Messiah’s render speed saved the day. Even at full 2k film resolution Messiah just kept spitting out frames. The movie comes out February of next year so I can show you what I did then. Nothing major.

#15

I was about to pick a fight about that, big thanks!!! :thumbsup:

#16

broken links

also i tried adding particle emitter and its emitting from the camera… regardless of where i place the particles?? also how do i add gravity? seems to have no effect.

Also, i noticed that the viewport UI is not adequate for the panel settings. for example if you drag the emission velocity to 4, the slider on the viewport goes off screen…

Also, there is no visual feedback for such things as cone angle… I think we need some kind of widgets for the emitters. allowing us to place and adjust some basic settings with handles rather then dragging sliders…

in general its very awkward moving and interacting wth emitters, m not sure what to drag and when i do drag, it doesnt seem to affect the particle emission origin???

#17

Question!
Anyone seen any hair growing in the particle demo clips??

:wink:

#18

tried adding a sphere primitive as a collision object and it doesnt work.

I added more primitives and started playing with their friction and bounce settings and that seemed to affect the particles.

however i then decided to delete one of the objects and it crashed the program.

#19

Was it a procedural or a real object sphere?

#20

messiah primitives are being used here.

so far its very awkward to work wth particles.

not in the same league as the animation toolset that is. There is no widgets or any kind of icons that represent your emitter type or basic attributes. for example a cone with an adjustable cone handle would be nice. and some tweaks to the floating UI are in order, when you select a value that is outside the floating GUI, i think the gui needs to reflect this by changing the MAX value of the slider to the value you input in the input field. otherwise the onscreen GUI is useless if you are working with values outside of its bounds. this goes for all floating GUIS, i find that many times i want a value that is outside of the range and end up with having to resort to the panel callout or worse, lose my prevous value by clicking on the slider and it just snaps back to 1 (or whatever the max slider amount may be)

I also dont like how the force node has a null object that stays in place even though you are moving its parent null object…

also, the drop down list for collision object selection acts very strangely. the first time i click on it, it quickly selects the bottom most entry and introduces an offset to the mouse cursor position. So when i drag my mouse up and down, the selection in the list moves up and down although the mouse cursor is well above the selected entry.

its a similar issue spotted in other drop down menus where it scrolls all the way to the bottom of the list on its own volition.