Particle Flow Discussion

#761

thanks … unfortunately I don’t have afterburn:cry: …so I have to find a way around without it…can you give me some tips to do it without afterburn…I’m trying it with spheres and rob’s shader at the moment…
the cracking teapot is really awesome, nice work there

#762

the cracking ground is the main thing I wanted to put up. the way it’s set up is really intuitive, few lines of code and it gives complete ease to animating that kind of thing.

honestly, CG fireballs (and I mean fireballs, as in thick dense bodies of fire opposed to tendril based fire) I wouldn’t achieve without fluids unless forced to.

You can get some interesting results with afterburn and other voxel based (raymarcher shaders more specifically) applications although the motion and information is still based around ‘dumb’ particles - so the feel isn’t ever going to be that great.

I’d say in max you might try displacement and a really complex falloff shader to get some kind of fire, although that’s teh only real way to go about it.

Hope that at least points you in the right direction. Get the demo of AB off turbo squids site!

#763

thanks…
I take a look at the demo but I’ve heared that the explode daemon is missing…so I can’t get the effect…which apps can achieve better results for that…maya or houdini??

#764

Honestly I’d say hold off a tiny bit longer as max’s market is about to be flooded with fluids plugins last count I counted at least five which are going to hit the market soon.
All of them are looking great.

Houdini’s base voxels are cool but nothing spectacular.
Maya has some great fluids although afterburn can achieve cooler ‘shader’ results with a lot more ease than maya’s, although obviously at this stage isn’t fluid based. Maya can fairly easily do some great smoke sims as well as basic fuel explosions although nothing too spectacular. Although can out of the box with a lot of battering around get some really nice fluids explosions, although before you think that that’s doing good explosions ‘out of the box’ keep in mind this is maya limited, even max 6 and ab togeather I 'think is cheaper than maya incomplete or limited from what I recall.

You can still do a lot of cool stuff with dumb particle sims although I’m just wanting to take the next step with interaction with objects and heat distribution information etc. as then you can get a lot more cooler results. But you can still ge tsome cool fireball results within pflow etc.
But to answer your Q Maya probably has the best out of the box (even though it’s out of the bigger more expensive box of the boxes).

PS. I’m not maya bashing just making sure when people take preference to ‘out of the box’ solutions they realize it’s not necessarily any cheaper or practical some of the time :wink:

-AM

#765

Allan
I am really interested about your method for the the cracktest.

I can remember something similar in Mission to Mars at the end when the “face” collapse itself or X-files the movie ending craked Ice (but for that one,I think that was not CG …)

the question is how to position the geometrik chunks correctly with particles?? in other words…how do u do that ?

thx

[http://www.blastcode.com/gallery/index.php] interesting cg cracking method for maya

#766

[http://forumel.free.fr/PF/cracked00.mov]

here is my quick test. my chunks are interpenetrated because of the random placement.
the reactor Fracture solution takes too many time to prepare.
so , any pure PF solution?

#767

that’s pretty cool there loran…nice work:applause:

#768

We did some really cool fracture stuff for blade which is kind of similiar although not as advanced as the stuff DD did for alias of a breaking window shattering. Although all of that stuff is purely TP based - Although obviously I wanted to do this in pflow as I’m building a bunch of material to do a presentation at siggraph.

I had originally built this test http://www.allanmckay.com/video/groundcrackup1.avi which is scripting controlling pieces of geometry. I tried to up that to a more advanced level on Saturday as right now I was manually assigning what particle effects what piece and such. So I wanted to try and improve on that, so I set it up to read off of arrays and in a way ‘thought for itself’.
In the end I’ve written a birthscript which reads geometry and position info amongst a few other things and mimics the prefractured geometry in. I could have it fracture the geometry itself although the talk’s on pflow and not coding so I wrote the fracture script as a seperate piece. If anyone’s interested I’ll upload the fracture script sometime, although there’s a dozen of them already out there :wink:
I’d upload the scene but have to keep this material ‘exclusive’ although it’s nothing too fancy. But will have plenty of new material up soon along with a new site. Been busy in the spare bit of time that I have :wink:

by the way cool video you made looks great :slight_smile: Put dust emitting off of it and it’ll cover up the intersections :wink:

#769

Ah, finally finished school, so now I can play with particles again too. Had to do a dynamic ground test myself and this is the first test : http://frodo.hiof.no/~deetee/dynground.mov

Doesnt look nearly as fancy as yours tho… hehe… But I will build upon it and see what I can come up with. I really want each piece to fit the other so It would look its best but have no idea on how to do that.

#770

the one I’ve built is kept pretty simple as I want it to be built for tutorial purposes. Although ideally if I was to do one for production I’d probably like to still make it effect geometry, and basically juse use the particles to send out animation curves to the geometry opposed to actually animating the pieces for me. As if I were to do something like the main street in san fran being torn up when the hulks moving underneath it in the hulk or something.

Ideally there’s a lot of stress and fracture R&D I want to do I’ve written notes on although is a little beyond me at this point to tackle - but don’t think it’d be very particle related :wink:

downloading… cool scene deetee nice! And great to see schools over :wink:

#771

The fracture stuff looks really nice, would love to be able to get the fracture script you mentioned Alan. I was checking some Maya stuff and found this http://www.blastcode.com/ , It looks quite intresting.

Alan, you talked about those fluid plugins. Do you mean that there will be particle like fluid tools, or fluid simulators with theyr own systems like AURA. Could you tell anything more on this subject?

And you mentioned the particle pixel renderer i while ago, do you know if anything like that will be released to the public?

And i cant wait to see the new tutorials you’re working on, they are priceless!

Thanks

#772

yeah saw that glass shatter stuff this morning, very nice!

I’m not aware of any point renderers being commercially released unfortunately as I think they’re all being kept quite tightly to their makers at this stage (ie. blizzard and a few other studios who are making them).

there’s a bunch of voxel fluids and a bunch of fluid dynamics plugins in development. my lips are zipped as to who’s making what and what is coming out or when - but ones that people know about are of course glu3d and aura etc. although there’s other way coller stuff like flood (frantic films) which was used on scooby doo 2 for the tar monster etc. (anyone see that?) and a few really cool ones which nobody knows about :slight_smile:

Yeah the fracture script is just one that’ll break stuff up into objects, it’s not the particle side. Will put it up soon, making a new site which’ll hopefully have a lot of cool new content, scripts, scenes, tutorials and what not.
Just in time for the DVD’s release which ‘hopefully’ will be June 18th through turbosquid… or at least that’s what I’m told :wink:

#773

Yeah, the maya thing looks real nice, but i quess it will be a quite slow process calculating those simulations.

Nice to hear about those fluid things, but is there anything in development which would bring “fluid” like particles with heat and the usual stuff to Particle Flow?

And real nice if I you can put the shatter script online, would love to test it. And i cant wait to buy the DVD, because I’ve bought a DVD drive because of it. :smiley:

#774

well last time I spoke to jesus pedrosa he mentioned they were talking to discreet/oleg about ways to get glu3d to talk directly to pflow so all of that information would go directly in there. So that would be interesting.
Plus another well known particle system is about to try out fluids too so everythings going fluids now. As that’s the most logical step.

Yeah DVD seems to be getting some good feedback - it’s a bit ghetto but I’m happy with what it covers. And be happy to finally see it out :slight_smile: June 18 is what I heard, I’ll let everyone know as soon as I hear anything new.

In regard to fracture simulations, stress fracture and brittle based sims can be real time, HL2 is using very basic forms of this. Although actual brittle based fracture sims aren’t necessarily too complex in terms of calculation time. Once again I know of at least one particle system which is R&D’ing this to evolve up from away from basic ‘fragmenting’ technology that most systems today use (thinking particles 1.0, particle studio, parray etc. (tp/ps at least have tesselation based fragmenting).

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~job/Papers/obrien-2000-AF.pdf

#775

I’ve been following this thread for a while but this is my first attempt at getting involved in some of the discussions. I would like to first say that I think this is one of the best threads I’ve ever read. I’ve learned so much from those that have contributed and I’d like to thank everyone. It’s been an invaluable resource for learning. I especially want to thank Allan and Bobo for the generous contributions of their knowledge and expertise.

Ok, so on to the question. I’ve got some students that have asked me about using pflow and reactor together. I’ve read the previous posts concerning this and it doesn’t quite do what we’re looking for. Before I get into detail I just want to ask; Is it possible to have pflow drive a rigid body simulation in reactor? Any info anyone can give me will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Brett

#776

Damn… 52 pages worth of post on the pflow… not bad…
Thought I would ask a question on the hair lookalike system that one could do with the help of pflow…
I doint somthing like a bearded man, now the truble is that the beard and the hair is on the same mesh… witch means that I can’t just use mesh select to select wich faces that should make the hair/beard do to the fact that they are of diffrent color and lenght, so the question is is it posible to make the pflow emit particel from a spesific material id and not the others, ie from id1 hair, from id2 beard and not anything from id nr 3-5…

(the dude looks quite funny with hair on his teeth but thats not the way I whant it…)

TNX for an exelent tread!

#777

vfxwiz, the way to drive RB with PF is a little bit brain dead :confused:
you have to use a PF script to drive your objects (collected in a RB collection). your driven object must be “unyelding” because they are pre-animated before the simulation and… here is the problem!
this object is like “linked” to particles, so Reactor can’t see its transform key (of course, it has not). So you must use another script to collapse the transformations to keyframe for this object.
I think we use to talk about that earlier in this thread…

if anyone have a better solution… let us know

vfxwiz, tell us what you exactly wanna do

#778

The_Row, use a Position Object operator with the density By Material option. There you can also select the particle ID.

This uses a map to determine the amount of particles, so if you have grayscale selected then white parts will have the most ‘hairs’.

You can also use vertex colours as a grayscale map. This way you can easily apply the colouration on your mesh.

Rens

P.S.

To make use of vertex colours while at the same time not rendering them:

  • Make a multi/sub material;
  • use two slots, one with material ID X and one with mat. ID Y;
  • put your visible material in the first slot and your ‘particle mask’ material in the second;
  • give the second material a Vertex Colour Map in the diffuse slot, channel 0;
  • use mapping with the first material as you would normally do, make sure you use ID X, but use a VertexPaint modifer for your second material (ID Y);
  • start painting;
  • in PFlow, make sure you use ID Y with the Pos. Surface operator.

Hope this helps.

#779

Tnx Rens, now all thats left is to render the short 200 frames animation… the time left is… 50 hours… damn…

#780

Thanks for the quick reply Loran, everyone on this thread is really helpful.

What my student has set up is a “cigar” box type model. Basically a box and a lid. She wants to have hundreds of moths come out of the box. She wants the moths to drive the hinged lid box lid open, meaning that they first spill out of the box as they’re trying to get the box lid open. We were trying to find a way to do this by using pflow to drive the reactor simulation of the hinged box lid. So far we’ve been unsuccessful in that effort. The only other way we’ve come up with is to fake it with animated (keyframed)moths but it takes more time and doesn’t look as realistic in my opinion. It does sound like it’s a pretty long and painful effort to get pflow to interact with reactor. Thanks for your help.

Brett