Particle Creature

[FreeRadical]

So I've modeled this pretty impressive sort of saber-toothed cat like beast, and initially I was planning on doing all sorts of neat molten-lava surfacing or some sort of obsidian texture for it...but eventually I settled on making it out of particle smoke. So I have the FX Emitter set up under Custom Objects in the thing's Item Properties...and I've changed the Nozzle to Object-Vertices, so the cat's skin emits particles...I've got the emitter's parameters set up just right, it works just great, looks good, etc.

Only problem is, displacements don't effect the particle emission. I have a skeleton set up to animate the cat with...and so I'll move the cat around with the bones, bend him up, whatever, but the particles still emit from the 'untouched' default surface, making a 'ghost' of the beast emit, even when it's not really there. Is there some displacement order or something that I can fool around with to make the FX Emitter do its emitting AFTER the object's been displaced by bones?

Much thanks to anyone with some insight.

[cgolchert]

Check out the scene tab for the dynamics menu. There should be an FX start button. Click on that and PFX will use the deformations from the object for particle emissions.

You might need to bake particles for the animation.

[cgolchert]

sub div plane with smoke 3 displacement.

[mattclary]

Man, that is cool, cgolchert!!!

[cgolchert]

updated image to see particles a little better....

(<edit>..well, in the original renders anyway)

[HowardM]

cool!
how are you doing that? youve got a bunch of particles sitting on a plane that is displaced? or are you using MD?

[cgolchert]

I have a subpatch plane that is being deformed by the smoke3 procedural (remember smoke is an animated texture) :) Turbulence for it is set at 1.0

-I activated the plane as an emitter.
-Birth was set to collision event.
-There is a collision box clipping the "wave"
-The plane was also set to be a collision object.


I baked the particle motion, pulled them off the plane and loaded them onto a null

[FreeRadical]

Ok good...FX Start...I should've remembered that. So...clarify for me...when you do FX Start, it's basically the equivalent, for particles, of doing MD Start, right? it just calculates everything you've set up, basically, right? It looks to be working, albeit a bit slowly for my taste. Um, but you mentioned particle baking. What is that? Is that any different?

And, on the side...are there any quick and easy ways to speed up calculation for particles? I don't have any collisions or anything set up, so I'd think that it would be working a little faster than currently. I've already played with the calculate-resolution, but that doesn't seem to have a whole lot of effect. Thanks already though.

[cgolchert]

Yes, FX_start is the "same" as MD_start.


Particle baking is in the last tab of the emitter panel. Choose "save motion" This will allow you to reload that exact solution into any scene. There will be no calculations involved.

Speed depends on what you are doing. For the image I had I was spitting out a few hundered. It depends on how many you need. You could always have a lower rez version of your model as an emitter using the same deformation. (depending on how you deform it)

[HowardM]

cool!
you should show a screenshot of the setup...if I understand, the collision plane creates the puffs when the water hits it? Awesome for crashing waves and even sea foam...but couldnt you use a gradient with a distance instead of a collision object?
:)

[SplineGod]

Originally posted by HowardM
cool!
how are you doing that? youve got a bunch of particles sitting on a plane that is displaced? or are you using MD?
Heres something similar except Im using the underwater texture to displace a mesh and generating HVs off the mesh itself using the height of the mesh to determine where the "foam" is created.
So in this case the very highest peaks of the displaced geometry get HVs. So this is done without the use of any particles.
http://www.3dtrainingonline.com/examples/sea_foam.mov

[HowardM]

Im psyched with these techniques! ..thanks guys!

QT Water test (http://www.3dink.com/waterspray.mov) ... a little work and this could look good!

http://www.3dink.com/waterspray.jpg

Larry, throw in some solid transparent bubbles to break up the foam and thats perfect!

[renderingfarmer]

Dear cgolchert, you have expanded my mind. Many many thanks to you and your genius. Weeee

[toby]

curse you!

I don't have time to play with water but now I have to!

save these guys' notes people -

[hrgiger]

Yeah, now I want to play around with that...

That last example really looks good Howard. You're right, I think with some tweaking, it could look very excellent indeed.

Larry, that's interesting but I don't get the impression of sea foam. Of course, not many good example of good liquid stuff done wtih Hv's out there...

[SplineGod]

Hey Steve,
I agree about the look, I was shooting for seeing how I could generate the foam at certain parts of the waves based on certain criteria such as height. The idea was to have the foam be created as waves went higher and only on the crests. The technique can easily be adapted to get the foam to be generated by other factors. :)
Now getting it to look like foam....thats another story. :)