Asteroid field ahead captain !

[Flat]

...and that's the problem mr. Sulu.

Okay, I'm trying to do your regular oh-so-original asteroid field.
Except that I decided for volumetrics instead of geometry.

So I dumped a few SPP in the usual asteroid field pattern (complete chaos :)), added HV's, and tweaked the hypertexture until I was satisfied with the looks of it. Fine.
Until the suckers moved.

If I use PFX for particles motion the hypertexture stays put and the voxels are moving through it, which is bad.
Okay, let's do without PFX then.

Using a particle object the hypertexture follows ok, but all the "rocks" are moving as one, which is bad too. Adding a displacement map to the object adds a nice randomness to the movements but now it's the texture (not hypertexture) that doesn't follow anymore, like it was on World Coords. :(

I tried a few things, like putting World coords on with the object itself as ref obj, even putting the displacement map as a layer on the textures using texture displacement, nothing worked so far.

Is there a way to get HVs to behave and move in a rock-like manner or should I get back to point-clone-plussed boulders ?


Phil, out of ideas on this one. :confused:

[toby]

maybe try the particle object again but with morphs instead of dislacement

[Flat]

Hmm.. might be worth a try, yep.
But I'm afraid morphing is just a displacement like the others, at least that's what morphmixer is. I'll try with an old-fashioned morph.

Thx for the idea !

Phil

[toby]

It's a common trick to texture something, then apply the morph in Layout, and the texture sticks / moves with the geometry - that's why I thought it might be useful - it's still going to be tricky tho, let us know how it turns out!

[Flat]

No banana, morphing is indeed acting like the other displacement plugins.

It seems the texture coordinates are evaluated after displacement, not before. Not very coherent as Hypertexture does evaluate before displacement.

I've a feeling this is more a bug than a feature, it looks like a forgotten flag somewhere...

Here's a little image summing up the problem.

Phil, thinking polygons are the only way. :(