Particle Flow Discussion

#521

Can a particle identify the contact with the geometry of other particles?

And after this contact, can you substitute the contacted particles with others?

*Sorry for my english

#522

yeah it’s possible, think it gets slow though.
having that problem right now writing an operator for particles to communicate with eachother in different events, not a fan :slight_smile:

#523

Originally posted by Bobo
[B]Ok, here is my original scene:

http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/mxs5/pflow/PF_HairyTeapot_05.max

Have fun!

Bobo [/B]

Thanks!

Ok, it all makes sense now.

The problem I had was that the hairs were turning into the teapot after a certain rotation and I didn’t bother to turn flex back on until the problem was fixed. But it turns out that the problem is in fact no problem at all, well, it still is, but it’s not visible when you use a small rotation and flex.
Just give the z rotation of hairy potter’s second key a value of -300 instead of -75 and you’ll see what I mean, even with flex.

Seems like I had it all along but was a little too busy wanting to make the teapot spin like mad. So am I still eligible for that “BINGOOOO!!!”? Hehe :slight_smile:

But is it possible to keep the hairs locked to the surface?
Please tell me I wasn’t chasing after an imaginary solution all that time :slight_smile:

Rens

#524

I must be the only not not beeing able to figure out how the flex and mesh select works. Never used those tools before. How do you get the hair to stick so nicely to the pot and not go into itself again… I just cant figure out the Mesh Select thing… hehe… Thats pretty noobish, even read the help with no luck… Maybe its because its 8AM and I havent gone to bed yet…

#525

Amazing thread.,. i could explain how much the information here helps,…, it allowed me to hop right into particle flow systems,…, (wouldn’t have it any other way :slight_smile:

I have one question though.,., i’m working on a project that includes a sequence where thousands of small bound dna and iron oxide cubes are swirling around in a vile, and then attract to a magnet that raises to the side of the vile,.,.

the behaviour is perfect and it would other wise be ready to go,…, except that i cannot use a poly or mesh for the dna because it is a rediculous number of polygons for a particle system.,., one dna strand probably has thousands in itself.,. i lowered the poly count as much as i could,. but it’s still just way to complex a shape for a pflow system,.,. (i think,…,:hmm: )

so since the dna strands are so small i tried to use a regular single helix that is renderable to 3pnts,. and then put a bend modifier on it.,. which should work,.,.

but the helix won’t render when it’s instanced in a pfsource.,.

has anyone ran into a similar problem.,., or have any suggestions on allowing for a high number of polys,.,.

thanks,.,.

noden.,.,.,

#526

Is there no way that you can render in multiple passes and then composite them in another program?

I am running into the same problem there on some of the stuff that I have done and have had to make many passes, and if you keep your z-depth you can still composite them to look 3d.

Hope this helps!

BigRanS

#527

thanks for the response,…,

i considered that as well.,., but the 2 bound objects (dna and cube) are grouped,…, and revolve around each other.,., so some are in front of the other and vise versa.,.,

i also tried shape facing,.,. but it looked very strange,.,. and there was a lot of redundancy in the form of the dna,…, even when the particle group was split into four sections of variations on the dna png sequence that was mapped to the shape facing,.,.

also.,. i am not exacly sure what you mean by maintaining the z-depth.,.

thanks again for the help,.,.

noden,.,.,.

#528

I just thought of the shape facing idea, and what you can do with that is render out two or three animations of the DNA spinning around and then place the animations on the facing shapes with an alpha so that it still looks 3d. This may not work to well with your lights, but then it may!

The z-depth is what you use in compositing programs to give a 2d object 3d depth. I know you can do it in combustion and after effects (i think)

Good luck, and I would like to see what you have so far!

:beer:

#529

Originally posted by deetee
I must be the only not not beeing able to figure out how the flex and mesh select works. Never used those tools before. How do you get the hair to stick so nicely to the pot and not go into itself again… I just cant figure out the Mesh Select thing… hehe… Thats pretty noobish, even read the help with no luck… Maybe its because its 8AM and I havent gone to bed yet…

MeshSelect is a light-weight modifier which can only be used to select sub-object elements (vertices, edges, faces) and pass them up the stack. In the beginning of MAX 1.0, you would have used EditMesh to do this, but it was too memory-hungry, so the developers decided to split its features into smaller modules. This way, you could add a MeshSelect on top of the mesh and a DeleteMesh on top. If you would select faces in the MeshSelect, they would be passed up to the DeleteMesh and deleted.
Then you could go back years later to the same scene and change the selection in MeshSelect, which would delete different faces… Procedural editing! Same with other modifiers that operate on sub-selections.

The reason for the MeshSelect on top of the Teapot was this:
When linking the single source hair to the teapot, PFlow took the complete hierarchy (Teapot+single Hair) as a source and started growing hairs on the hair! Some on this thread used a constraint which would solve the problem, but I had a better idea. I switched the Position Object operator to operate on Selected Faces and used the MeshSelect to provide the selection. The beauty of this approach is that you can go into the MeshSelect and select some faces, and the hair will grow only on them! You could switch to Element Sub-Object level and select single elements like the Teapot’s lid, and the hair will move there and so on… I checked the “Lock On Emitter” checkbox in the Position Object operator to get the hair particles to stick.

Just load the scene and look around…

Bobo

#530

Here is my PFlow hair test. I had to test how it would work on human (android), pretty easy to set up.

#531

I’m testing here some hairstyle and fur, looks very promissing.

Only dynamics isn’t good enougth, yet.

Nice tests MasterBercon. Try to make more hair "objects’ (more patterns) and try to spin them a little.

#532

well,.,. it seems that the reason the renderable helixs weren’t rendering in a particle system was because of the bend modifier that was stacked on them.,., it does the same with the fdd boxes.,. not sure if this is just a flaw on my computer,…, or if other people have ran into this,.,. but i’m just going to settle for linear strands of dna and leave it at that,…, especially with a 2 day deadline,. :surprised

i’m also suprised at how nice seperated particle systems can look with the mental ray DOF,.,. ahh.,., it’s beautiful.,.

and again.,. thanks for the input BigRanS

#533

This is a timelapse of hair growing (or a chia pet)

chia pet

Now the next thing I’m trying to figure out is how to integrate this with what bobo did. So that they start off straight and after a time begin to get a bend and get more flex.

#534

Need improvement.

Fur01

Fur02

#535

Damn! It looks just like my chest! The skin tone and everything!

#536

Really Allan! I wouldn’t know, lol. Ok guys I’ve been fidiling around to get this kind of stringy effect and I think it’s kickass. It kinda looks like hair but it will probably look different once I render out the animation. Theres two versions, one without the vortex space warp and one with. Tell me what you guys think. :wink:

silly particle thingy

silly particle thingy1

And then a frame of the animation…

silly particle thingy frame

#537

WOW, thats cool Tyler! I would love to see that rendered with some facing particles and one of the “ghost” shaders I put in the mental ray shader library.

Jeff

#538

Hehe, yeah I’m using the mr_subscatter material but I’ll try many different shaders to get different results.

#539

New thread for tweaking and making shaders for particle hair.

Particle Hair

#540

I have a question for the Scriptmasters

In Pflow the Position Object Emitt Particel but random
Is it posible to write a script that Emitt the Particel in a special order ?