rendering particles with Arnold

#1

Hi.

Has anybody any expierience with rendering point particles through a DSO with Arnold?

At the moment I am caching out particles (>10mio) with partio as PTCs and rendering them with Renderman Studio through a customized DSO.

I’d like to get started doing the same with Arnold. I heard there is Exocortex Crate that does exactly that (still not sure about what format you have to cache out the particles). I tried to contact exocortex but so far no feedback.

Has anybody another solution? Ideal would be to cache out multi-caches (partitions) in numbered folders (like krakatoa) and bringing them in at rendertime. Isnt there a MTOA-translator with partio?

Thanks a lot.

#2

If you are already using partio and a dso, a transition should be quite easy. Especially the creation of a particle dso is very similiar to the renderman one. We have done it with a arnold procedural which reads the particle file (in our case a naiad emp file) via patio and uses these points to create the arnold points what is quite easy if you have done it already in another software.

#3

Hallo Haggi…

well I haven’t done it myself, somebody wrote the DLL for me - I have the code though.

What format does Arnold need the particles? .ass?

#4

What do you mean with “via partio”? How did you get the points through partio? Did you convert the emps on the fly or wrote them out again in a different format?

#5

I extended the partio library to enable it to read emp particle files. I integrated the partio reader into our procedural what means we can now read particles from most particle formats and generate the particles directly in the procedural.