hypervoxels / PFX functionality combined?

[pospi]

ok, i am after an animatable effect like that in the test image below.

It was made using particle storm, using the FX_linker to spawn randomly sized cubes roughly at the vertices of the parent object, which is just a bunch of points. Of course, this way doesn't really work, because deforming the parent object through bones doesn't change the position of the particles.. Recalculating the particles for each frame will make new cubes in completely different positions, sizes and rotations, again, no good.

Telling each cube to use the bones from the parent object is the best method i have so far, but it still doesn't much help me because the cubes themselves will be deformed by the bones.

What would be really awesome is if it were somehow possible to combine the functionality or HV and PFX, so that each point acts as an emitter, but the 'object hypervoxel' (as im going to call it) is emitted and doesn't interact with neighbouring objects. Of course, this would be really easy to do if i wanted spherical sub-objects, but for cubes and even more complex shapes i guess it's pretty hard.

As you can see by the image, it doesn't really matter if the subobjects clip through each other...

So, any suggestions??

[HowardM]

huh? animatable from a jpg? what do you mean...what kind of animation?
anyways, I think turning on Subd Order to Last will fix the bones/pfx problem...

uh..and you can make each point be an emitter...you parent an emitter to the main one...tell it to generate by 'parent emitter'...then you have control over the child particles...

or am i not sure what youre trying to do....?

by the way, is the green a volumetric light or actual HVs? they look cool..

[pospi]

no no, the image is just a test, because i havent worked out how to animate the effect yet..
what i am trying to do is get bone animation on those cubes, but using the bones from the emitter object to animate them..

so yeah, the way it is now, each point is an emitter, but it only emits one particle, and then i replace each particle with a cube.

I did it that way because i couldn't figure how to parent a cube to a point on the parent object (assuming there IS a way)...

and yeah, the green is just basic volumetric lights (: thanks!

[HowardM]

ohhh, i see, thats cool, a different way of doing things...
so how did you setup the emitters? manually?!
I see...small volumetric lights...
I thought you made a humanoid object, then turned it into an emitter, then FXlinked boxes to the particles (now i see theyre clumps o' boxes from individual emitters! :) )
try that!

[pospi]

no no thats right, the humanoid object is an emitter, the boxes fxlinked to the particles..

but when i try to animate it, of course the particles dont follow the vertices they were emitted from, so animating the humanoid mesh has no effect on the boxes.. thats the problem (:

[Bytehawk]

couldn't you just point clone an object onto the points of the humanoid object in modeler and deform that?

[HowardM]

yeah but i think thats the problem he doesnt want bones to bend the boxes...
i dunno, i think it would look cool!
:P

[HowardM]

Are you hitting FXstart, by the way?

[Bytehawk]

the way he did the boxes I don't think the deformation would matter a lot.

you could always use strong fallof weigts to compensate