Control Particle Brightness with Textures

#1

Hi all,

I am working in a shot that has a particle system emitting planes. I applied textures with keyed people in front of greenscreen to those planes. All together it is supposed to be a huge crowd at a concert. Everything works fine, I was just wondering if there is a way for me to apply a greyscale texture to the Emitter (also a plane) that would somehow control the color gain of the textures. This way I would like to relight the crowd. The particles closer to the stage should obviously brighter then others.

Thanks in advance for the help!

#2

by emitting planes do you mean sprites or are you using the instancer?
If your using the instancer you could instance a group instead of the plane itself then drop whatever amount of geometry underneath afterwards to get passes for lighting.

#3

Hey, yes I am using the instancer. To be honest, I don´t really understand what you mean. I was thinking of some kind of a ramp, that would make the textures on particles, that are closer to the stage, brighter and those further away, darker. How exactly would I be able to do that with your method?

#4

what i meant was you can instance a group node instead of the geometry…so afterwards you can replace or add geo to an already cached particle.
As far as lighting, I thought you meant just that… using a light, if your looking for some per particle control over Mayas instance geo for shading your out of luck…

SOup may contain something that handles this but not sure. Mayas instancer is pretty old and doesnt handle Per Particle shadeing of geometry.

good luck