Particle Flow Discussion

#4935

thats good to hear. Your a real industry heavyweight, and deserve to have a better website. I hate website creation myself, so any website ive ever had looks about like yours lol

#4936

I want to create dust from falling stones. Actually stones are instanced geometries (birth script) and I want emit dust from stone vertices. Is there a script solution to do this?
thx

click the image to watch the video

#4937

John did something similar here - http://www.orbaz.com/gallery/?id=30

Thanks,
Oleg B.

#4938

Thx Oleg, but the fact is I dont use fumefx nor ToolBox#2…Just want to emit particles from instanced geometry vertices… Is it very complex to script?

#4939

Use Pflow baker to bake out the first system to animated objects then use all of them to emit new particles with object position.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/pflow-baker

Or you can use Box 3 to do it too

#4940

Out of interest how come you cant just use a “spawn test” to spawn from the pivots of the geometry, instead of from the verts?

You should get something that looks very close to the same thing, especially if you use facing sprites for the dust.

Anyways, hope it help :slight_smile:

Kieran.

#4941

Thank you FloppyB, this will help a lot!

Yes you are right Kogden but I just want to test if it could be better this way :slight_smile:

#4942

Hi
I am making a “video wall” where the screens get blown away by wind the camera then zooms into one of the blocks. e.g. the image posted below. Simple position object with a shape instance.I need to map a hell of allot of different images (about 400 images) onto these screens. Every screen has a different image /video clip. How can i randomly map 400 images to 400 particles or more :slight_smile: What would b the best way to do this… scripting?
Any links or advice would be appreciated.
Thanks

#4943

Seems scripting would be the best approach since there are 400 different textures, at least to create the material. You can use a pflow material static operator to cycle through all of the sub-materials.

Just make a 400 material Multi/Subobject material. It is more than likely going to hammer your system (you’ll be calling a lot of I/O for that many animated textures) but I don’t see why it should work. I haven’t done 400+ or with avi’s but it works with stills.

I’d like to here any other ideas as well. :slight_smile:

EDIT: Since most are so far away how many are really going to be that visible, certainly not all of them?

#4944

Yup, I agree with this one. I attached a (very ooold) script I use to create the multisubmat. But it’s a very “involved” script, where if you need to set certain properties for the sub materials, you will have to dive inside the script and set them yourself. Just pick the folder where all your textures are and wait for it to load, the material will be placed on the current active material slot. I suggest testing it out on a folder with few textures first.

Another option, just an idea though. If you could combine all of your images into one single large image, you could probably use the [font=Courier New]setParticleMapping [/font]function in a Script Operator to offset your mapping based on a particle ID.

…Or maybe create an animated version of it (or just create an .ifl file), then use Mapping Dynamic with a Script Operator to lock the particle’s age. So that particles will only use a frame of your animation.

The only idea I’ve used/tested so far is Jonhnny’s suggestion. Good Luck!

I hope this helps!

#4945

Thanks for the reply. I have been adding the images/clips in the Multi/Subobject and scatter them random, Its a PAIN :slight_smile: The images all need to be hi res. The camera moves slowly past the “stream” of images/clips. I will probably use a deflector where the particles go out of frame to make the scene less heavy.

Thanks Galagast, I will give your script a try, see if i can figure out whats going on there:) But that sounds like thats exactly what i am after. \m/ I just need to get past doing the Multi/Subobject manually it takes to way long.
Ill let u know how this ends up.
Thanks again

#4946

Greetings! So I’ve posted here before with some issues in Pflow, and everyone here was incredibly helpful. I’m hoping you guys can help me with my latest problem :smiley: So here’s the current issue - I’ve got a particle flow that’s generating little muzzle flashes, and a script that’s moving lights to those particle locations. However, while it moves them properly, it’s also randomly spinning and rotating the lights as it does this. I have no idea why, as I’m only using the .position data to move them, not the full .transform. Here’s the script as I currently have it:

on ChannelsUsed pCont do
(
	pCont.usePosition = true
	pCont.useAge = true
)

on Init pCont do
(
	global lightmatch01 = $LaserMuzzleflashA*
	lightmatch01.pos = [0,0,-100000]
	lightmatch01.scale = [1,1,1]
)

on Proceed pCont do
(
	partcount = pCont.NumParticles()
	count = amin #(partcount,lightmatch01.count)
	countclock = (pCont.ParticleAge/4)
	for i in 1 to count do
	(
		pCont.particleIndex = i
		lightmatch01[i].pos = pCont.particlePosition
		lightmatch01.pos = [0,0,-100000]
		lightmatch01.scale = [1,1,1]
		lightmatch01[i].multiplier = 1-countclock
	)
	lightmatch01.scale = [1,1,1]
)


on Release pCont do
(
)

lightmatch01.scale doesn’t appear to DO anything, which strikes me as extremely odd. I’ve tried lightmatch[i].scale = [1,1,1] as well, and that had no effect as well. I’ve done just about everything I can think of, but I have no idea why these lights are being randomly scaled and rotated. So that’s the main issue, but there’s a couple of other things I’d like this script to do - when the particle dies, I’d like to move the light back to a holding position - like [0,0,-100000]. I’d also like to link the light’s color and multiplier animation to the particle’s age, though I don’t know if that’s even possible.
All the lights are unique, not instances, and all the lights start out at 0,0,-100000.
Let me know if there’s any further information I can provide you guys.
Thanks!

#4947

So there are no rotation, spin, or scale operators in your flow? That is odd. I have no idea why they would act that way.

What type of light are you using?

What does your flow look like?

The multiplier you could do something like this:

on Init pCont do 
 (
  global theLight = $Omni01
  theLight.multiplier = 1.0 
 )
 
 on Proceed pCont do 
 (
 	count = pCont.NumParticles()
 	for i in 1 to count do
 	(
 		pCont.particleIndex = i
 		a = pCont.particleAge as integer
 		b = a / ticksperframe
 		c = theLight.multiplier
 		if c >= 0 do
 		(
 			theLight.multiplier = c - (b * 0.002)
 		)
 	)
 )

The color being point3 maybe a little more difficult based on age. I guess you could have a birth age color , a middle color and a death age color and assign it to the light.

Moving the light back should be easy enough, you could if/then/move according to its age (ie if pCont.particleAge >= 20 then (theLight.pos = [0,0,-100000]) or you could test to see if the particle still exists then move it.

Some ideas anyway

#4948

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#4949

Hey people! Just check out my new blog. I will post lots of things here.
I ve just post my wall collapse video WIP
http://loran-cg.blogspot.com/

#4950

Very nice result Loran. Fantastic result, specially without the use of dynamics.

#4951

Nice Loran :slight_smile:

You really didn’t like that wall did you, smashing it to pieces like that :smiley:

#4952

I have been trying to make different kinds of fireworks animation using PFlow. I got my best results using Afterburn, but it is still not looking the way like a real fireworks (I mean sort of) looks like.

What would you advice me how to render it better? I was thinking about getting some sparkles in the air by duplicating the PFlow sources and give it a 1/100th particle count with more turbulence and keep away value, and rendering it with small long cylinders with self illumination? I mean glow and motionblur can help, but I would like to make it look better before MB or Glow.

two videos:
http://ezstudio.eu/videos/player.php?file=0905-egybe-gorogtuz1.mp4&w=944&h=272
http://ezstudio.eu/videos/player.php?file=0905-egybe-hajo1.mp4&w=1224&h=469

BTW, I have a thread for this, where I posted images too, here I just wanted to ask about some additional tricks which you might know for a better PFlow script.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=5865211

#4953

First things first - post some reference of the type of firework you wanna achieve :wink:

Edit - very cool setup Loran, waiting for the renders!

#4954

Loran, that’s awesome!