shape animation emitter

#1

does anyone have tips on speeding up pflow when dealing with shape animated emiters. as soon as i check the box it really slows down. I guess multithreading would be good! but seriously is there any way to improve the performance?

cheers

paul

#2

Use a lower poly clone for the emitter, or again clone your emitter mesh and if there are unused portions of the emitter mesh delete/or simplify them and only use the active birth areas.

#3

I have done crazy things to avoid animated meshes; like cut a skinned mesh in to 40 armor plate like pieces then used attachment controllers to add dummies to follow the original skin, then linked the armor pieces to the dummies.
Rebuilding the position object in Box3 also helped speed things up

#4

hey floopy

yes i know what you mean, I have done exactly the same in the past, but in this case i don’t have the underlying bones just a mesh with a point cache. It’s still possible but even crazier! I have had to split a copy of the mesh up as you say, then constrain these new pieces to the original shape animating one, but its still too slow, so i am then using the Bake Objects srcipt to bake out the hierarchy and keyframes so I finally have my non shape animating objects for emission!

what a pain though as i have to do this for four lions and everyshot i have to redo it as I really should have established this in the original animation part of the pipeline. too late now!

#5

Hey Paul!

Have a look into Krakatoa GeoVolume mod. You could save the particles as PRT and then load them up into the flow with KrakatoaBirth.

#6

Carlos,

that sounds like it could be a great solution, i have now got on the beta program and will test asap, thanks so much for your support man! Hope you are well.

what have you been up to recently, where i yer working? we are thinking of hiring an effects specialist at the mo, as we are all such generalists having to cover all bases. PM me.

cheers

paul

#7

I havent actually tested it on a deforming mesh, so I’m just assuming it works. Mayb Bobo or someone else could enlight us.
Lets us know how it goes.

Will shoot u a PM soon.

Cheers matey.

#8

You can animate your geovolume modified objects but your particles do not move with the animated mesh, your mesh is basically moving through a voxel grid, so all you see are the voxels within the confines of the mesh object.

#9

Yep, that makes sense :banghead:

Silly question: I guess the GeoVol will have to b at the top of the stack, dont have Max at home, so was just wondering if the deforming mod could go on top of the geovolume, kinda the same way you can chuck modifires on top of PRT sequences.

#10

Well it works both on top and underneath the GeoVolume but for the sake of being proper it is probably best on top.

I should say I don’t think i was correct by saying traveling through a “voxel grid”, I may get corrected on that.:stuck_out_tongue: I think I may have a new strain of Voxelitis V1G2 (I am starting to see everything as voxels):drool:

Also Voxels - http://voxelstein3d.sourceforge.net/ :smiley:

#11

LOL!

I actually thought of a workaround, although havent tested it.

Turn off skin or any other deforming modifire, apply GeoVolume and save PRT, then load PRT (with PRT Loader), apply skinwrap and wrap to the animated mesh, this way the particle volume would be deformed. Save that as PRT and then load into PFlow… :slight_smile:
Mayb a crazy setup but if works saves the pain of waitin endeless hours for particles to update, as with Position Object and animated shape.

#12

Hmm, going to give that a shot :slight_smile:

Voxelstein 3d pretty funny aye :slight_smile:

#13

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