Hi
I just want to confirm, is there a compelling reason/scenario to use Legacy Particles instead of nParticles?
The only way I can think of is when opening old scenes but other than that I can’t think of any.
I just want to confirm my understanding that nParticles is superior in every context against Legacy Particles.
There are some cases where neither offers a clear benefit over the other, except the legacy Particles offer less overhead and fewer nodes. For example, when instancing environmental geometry such as trees, flowers, bushes, rocks, etc., there’s not really any benefit to using nParticles. The best free instancer plugin, Environment System for Maya, just uses regular particles to “place” all the plants. It’s easy to use, clean UI, but when things get weird you can go right into the instancer and ParticleShape attributes and adjust or alter the placement manually just fine. You could do the same thing with nParticles (if the guy rewrote his plugin) but it would give you a few unnecessary nodes including the Nucleus solver itself, which is entirely unnecessary in this case.
An example of this usage, placing trees into a simple rustic scene:
So if you don’t need any physics, regular particles offer less memory overhead, generally.
Hi InfernalDarkness. Thanks for the insight. Never knew about the Environment System for Maya, thanks for mentioning it.
Gave me insight on the two system. This led me to conduct some few tests.
I had an nParticle (with Solver Gravity off) and the legacy Particle emitting off 100,000 particles per second on a separate scene.
It seems like the Legacy has better multi threading calculation. It grinds to 60 to 70% of my CPU usage trying to reach a 24 fps.
While the nParticle seems to cap at 30-35% of CPU usage despite having only 10 to 12 fps (i.e. not yet max to 24).
So, I guess all things equal (not using any physics), legacy particle seems to be the way to go due to its multi threading efficiency.
Correct me if I’m wrong.