Simulating a battle field with a deflector

#1

Hello,

I’m trying to simulate, as best possible the scene in 300 where the 10,000 arrows “blot out the sun” So far I believe I have the making of this effect thanks to Escalight’s tutorial. I’m taking it a bit further by setting up cameras and the scene so it can be a proper battlefield.

The deflector takes all the arrows and allows them to bounce realistically a couple of times, but then they all stick in the ground at a rather unrealistic 90 degrees perpendicular to the floor. As in the following screen.

I want some particles to bounce and lie flat, and some to stick in the ground. I figured a good solution to this would be to have multiple emitters placed in regiments of the Persian army. It allows me to stagger their launch, give a more imperfect series of angles/arcs.

What deflector should I use and how should I set it up? Accept my apology if this has been answered, I’m a Maya user mostly and I’m not really up to scratch with the terminology in Max or particles in general.

Thanks in advance

http://i31.tinypic.com/2j43j13.png

#2

Take a look here: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=4986460&postcount=4378

#3

Thank you, that’s exactly it. I don’t understand it but I’ll study the particle layout.

It seems there are objects in the scene that are not selectable which makes it harder. SDeflector is listed but not in the scene.

#4

http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/3382/arrowswirenp7.png
Purple mid-air, blue stuck and orange bouncing 2 times then stopping. Hoping to tweak the bounce a lot.
Bit of a bodge job but it’s coming along nicely. Thanks for your help, it’s starting to almost look like a B-movie equivalent.

#5

Nice to hear that it worked out!
Keep adjusting (experimenting!) and post the final animation when you’re done. :slight_smile:

#6

I’ve been learning Particle Flow lately and thought I would give this a whirl.

Here’s my result:

http://www.twiik.net/files/videos/arrows.mov

If you’re still working on this feel free to have a look at my scene (attached as a .zip).

#7

Very impressive, I couldn’t get mine to work with multiple objects like that so I settled for a flat battlefield. I’ll check your scene out and see if I can take mine any further.

#8

I just remebered that nothing in my scene is labeled, but it’s a very simple particle flow so hopefully it doesn’t matter. Just ask if there’s something you’re wondering about.

For my scene I used a basic deflector for the ground and 1 udeflector for each of the objects. I have no idea what the other 8 deflectors are at the moment, so I’ll have to read up on that later. :slight_smile:

Collision with the basic deflector takes the arrows to an event which slow the arrows to a stop very fast with a drag force simulating them getting stuck in the ground, and collision with any of the other deflectors (the rocks and wall) sends the arrows to an event which breaks them apart and bounces them around some before they stop.

I’m still very new to particle flow myself. The only knowledge I have comes from Pete Drapers ‘Deconstructing the Elements’-book which I recently recieved and some hours of just playing with particle flow.

From what I understand, one of the things you can never achieve properly in such a battlefield scene with Particle Flow is the arrows (or anything for that matter) bouncing and colliding realisticly with something because Particle Flow only test for collision in the particle pivot point and thus the arrows will intersect stuff when they bounce around.

#9

that topic is very well featured by chris thomas of cg-academy.com in his 5th dvd:

http://cg-academy.com/pages/topic_particles/dvds_pflowbasics5/dvds_pflowfundamentals5.php

but is does pretty much what the maxfile above does.

brandon riza from blur has impressive R&D on his website too:
http://brandonriza.com/3DVisualEffects/HTML/WarHammer--RandD.htm
http://brandonriza.com/3DVisualEffects/HTML/3DVisualEffects.htm

cheers,
anselm

#10

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