Blobmesh, pflow and mixing colours

#1

I posted what might be a rather vague question on the area forum a while ago, but as that didn’t get any replies I thought I’d try my luck in here with more of a concise question!

Adding a blobmesh to Pflow is all well and good and gives great control over the particles but it’s creating a material for the system that’s so far eluded me.

What I’m aiming for is to have 3 colours of blobs which merge thus blending the colours, the only way I’ve found so far is to use a single blobmesh as adding others to the system means they don’t interact with each other, adding a materialbyelement modifier means that I can give the blobs some variety in colour but this doesn’t mix the coloures and seems to be a bit unpredictable (i.e. blobs can change colour).

I’m reasonably sure that it can still be done in max but the type of shader needed has been out of my grasp. I’ve attached a pic to illustrate the idea!

Matt

#2

ok i did a test. uses one blob mesh
if you make the particles the colour that you want the blobs to be, i used 2 mr shaders with glow in surface one red and one blue, make another shader, use the arch viz one, set the refraction to 1 and the glossiness to 0.02 or something low (this kinda blurs the refraction), apply this to the blob mesh
now the colour of the blob mesh is dependant on the colour of the particles they are around…
this should work i can post the scene if you like
m

#3

Thanks! I hadn’t touched mr as I’m not familier with it but that sounds like it should work, I’ll give it a shot when I get back to my computer :thumbsup:

#4

Just a quick update, tried this method and it works pretty well! :smiley:

It’s not as easy to get the colours I’m after using the glow but I can pretty much fake these to be as ‘near to’ as possible.

It leads me to wonder if it’s possible to paint the blobmesh vertices with ID’s inherited from the particles.

Cheers for the tips kilgoretrout, it’s certianly one to remember!

#5

No worries
yeah that would be a usefull thing to be able to do will look into it myself…

did find that if you could get the particles to be smaller but keep the size of the blob you get a better blend between the colours… the only way i could find to do this without using push on the blob was to use a mesher on the particles, make the blob mesh use that to define the shape of the blob and use push on the mesher does slow things down alot though.

also you could use normal shader material for the particle just turn up the self illumination

anyway post up what you come up with yeah
m

#6

I still need to pretty much redo my Pflow as this is just a bit of a test scene to see if I can get the look/feel right. My main challenge now is to make it all look a bit more metalic, having a material on the blobmesh with a near white colour in the refraction means that the surface for reflections ends up looking a bit cellular.

#7

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.