particles in LW

[creacon]

Hi,

I'm checking out the SDK to see what the possibilities are with the particle functions, and I'm quite surprised to see that there is a lot of stuff in there that isn't used in the emitter interface.

After an hour I created a simple particle system that creates particles with random rotation, scale AND color.

What's even stranger is that when I apply HV's to it, it sees the particle color and applies it, it sees the particle size (without having "use particle scale" checked in the HV panel), and of course it sees the position and rotation.

I've also noticed that there are buffers for particle scale and particle size.

The size value in HV's is apparently a multiplier.

So in short, I am looking to see if someone can shed some light on all this stuff, or is there more SDK documentation or examples than the example written in 2000?

creacon

[creacon]

BTW, this was the result of this small experiment.
A few of the most important questions I have:

- The particles aren't displayed until I apply HV and check show particles, so no small yellow dots in layout. Do I have to implement this as a custom object? (the plugin is a displacement plugin for now because I started with Annti's nodal displacement example)
- What would be the best place to implement this? since the particlesystems are global you could use them about anywhere.
- What do the node access functions need to be able to output a vector correctly? In the displacement example the verts, weights, gNorm and spotsize are used?

[adamredwoods]

Regarding particles and custom objects:

If you look at how the built-in particle generate is used, you'll see that it auto-applies a customobject onto the emitter null. So yes, w/o applying HV's you would have to draw your own.

You could also draw particles using the new gizmo handler. Anywhere, in any object class. Which is nice.

[creacon]

Thanks,

I switched to the custom object plugin, and my particles are displaying now, I managed to hook them into the nodal editor and now I can control position rotation and size using nodes.

Any idea if the gizmo's will display faster then the custom objects? and are the gizmo's really made for this kind of stuff? I thought that they were more for layout tools?

creacon

Regarding particles and custom objects:

If you look at how the built-in particle generate is used, you'll see that it auto-applies a customobject onto the emitter null. So yes, w/o applying HV's you would have to draw your own.

You could also draw particles using the new gizmo handler. Anywhere, in any object class. Which is nice.