Particle Improvement Suggestions

[John Montgomery]

Post your suggestions for improving the flame/inferno particle system here…..

[uwe_wiesemann]

Hi, maybe we can have particles like combustion/illusion combined with the possibilities (3d space) from IFF.
regards
Uwe Wiesemann

[kalthans]

i think the single biggest improvement in particles will come when there are some built-in capabilities for varying particles that are textured with a clip. currently if you map squares with a clip all the squares will update with the progression of the clip…regardless of how long they have been alive. two suggested changes would be:

#1 add a parameter or particle modifier that allowed for the texture source clip to be referenced from varying start points or frames….this would allow you to add a bit of variety by effectively slipping each particles texture. in a perfect world this would be a dynamic value that could be animated or controlled with an expression.

#2 add a function that allows the particle system to reference a given set of clips (say a reel called “particle_source”) randomly. this would allow you to have many different types of particles within the same emitter (different bits of debris, differnt types of leaves, etc). this would have the added benefit of being able to effectively take advantage of particle sorting (currently particle emitters don’t obey each other’s sorting, so you if try to add variety by adding many emitters you often get zbuffer issues).

IMHO this is a very simple function and one that could add tremendous flexibility and value to the particle system.

[sinancg]

I think in relevant order:
1. Texturing particles as everyone has been saying. How about moving the particle’s texture center to the actual center. At the moment to properly scale or rotate textures we have to set the center to 360,288 manually (for PAL).
Since we have resolution independence the textures wouldn’t take up so much space on the arrray. Maybe even a single PAL/NTSC frame can have an array of 72×57 pixel frames for the texture animation. Sort of like MIP mapping in texture map algorithms.

2. Improved manipulators:
– Path manipulator should really constrain them to the path. Could be an option like speed and position.
– A general turbulence manipulator with parameters for position, speed, rotation and maybe bunching.
– Attract particles to surface with regards to the alpha channel
– Attract particles to object
– Object deflectors

3. Better functionality when writing functions (pun intended)
– Ability to access other parameters in the scene, like an object’s position
– User defined variables like power and magnitude (these first two are interchangable I think)
– Rotation parameter
– if/then argument (smoothstep is fine but sometimes nested conditionals are needed)

4. Surface blend modes for particles/geometry, at least simple add

5. Ability to create proper alpha channel info from square particles. At the moment the particles appear as squares in the matte output.

These are the first ones that jump to mind.

Thanks for starting a thread John.

Sinan Vural

[Author]

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