Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 23:33:48 -0000 From: Stephen Thornber Subject: [IML] Quest: Particles?? Hi guys. Here's a quesstion for you. I was playing with a friend's copy of Lightwave (He's rich!) I was getting nowhere, when he showed me a great thing.! He added 100 points (particles?) and randomly strewn them about, then he added a texture and rendered. I was stunned, single point particles rendered with texture, it looked good, but now he added 2 key frames, the first (frame 0) with the particles sized down into a tiny area, the second key (frame 20) was the particles re-sized. He rendered the anim. It was the particles (golden colour) zooming outward, like an explosion. okay, I thought thats a nice effect. But now he hit the particle blur button and re-rendered. I WAS STUNNED..!! a simple anim, now looked fab, as, as the partices zoomed outward, they blurred & stretched. (like a backward hyperspace effect.) What I want to know is. 1 - How do I get single points (particles - NOT TRIANGLES) to appear in Imagine.... (I can't suss it..?) 2 - Does Imagine (4) have a particle blur...?? basically I have wanted to do a certain anim for ages, but a part of the anim, is a spaceship getting blown up, and I think the Imagine explode is very cheezy, and all those triangles look crap. So I would love to blow up my ship and add loads of single points and do the LW thing........ anyone know what I'm trying to get across? BTW - I am NOT Imagine bashing, I'd rather do my anim with Imagine than save up for years to buy LW... Imagine Rules..... (and LW's modeller sucks...) ---------------------------------- Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 20:39:56 -0500 From: Mike Halvorson Organization: Impulse, Inc. Steve I want to do the same thing, no kidding. Its a cool thing, limited but cool. I want sparkly things all over the place. Now if I can just get the code in we can all do the same thing. I really do agree and I want it too, now I gotta make it work somehow, so we can all do this. Unfortunately, I dont know of an easy way of doing this right now, the blur would be no bid deal but the pixels would. ALso the key frame thing, is really the same in both you just have to go to the frame in Imagine and say hey, I am here and do this now. But its cool. I appreciate your comments maybe someone else has an idea of how we can do this. Maybe Mark WIllis can write us a texture,,,,Mark where are you. ---------------------------------- Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 01:25:44 +0400 From: Charles Blaquiere Stephen Thornber wrote: > What I want to know is. > 1 - How do I get single points (particles - NOT TRIANGLES) > to appear in Imagine.... (I can't suss it..?) Lightwave seems to have code to deal with the special case of single-point particles. Imagine only does one thing: triangles. > 2 - Does Imagine (4) have a particle blur...?? Not that I know of. You'd have to use Imagine's motion blur, and even then, would have to select so many extra frames (to ensure having streaks, not dotted lines) that it wouldn't be funny. > Imagine explode is very cheezy, and all those triangles look > crap. Don't use Explode! Use the Shredder F/X; it will tear your object to pieces, either randomly or via user-defined face subgroups. Your spaceships won;t look like a bunch of exploding triangles. ---------------------------------- Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 11:14:42 +0200 From: Torgeir Holm >basically I have wanted to do a certain anim for ages, but a part >of the anim, is a spaceship getting blown up, and I think the >Imagine explode is very cheezy, and all those triangles look >crap. So I would love to blow up my ship and add loads of single >points and do the LW thing........ >anyone know what I'm trying to get across? I guess what you need to read is Tom Granberg's pyrotechnics tutorial. He does exactly what you want: blow up a spaceship, and it looks awesome. http://www.betechdata.no/gfxdude/pyro.htm ---------------------------------- Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 12:53:09 -0400 From: Scott Sutherland Stephen Thornber wrote: >He added 100 points (particles?) and randomly strewn them about, >then he added a texture and rendered. > >I was stunned, single point particles rendered with texture, I am uncertain here what you mean. How can a point object have a texture (e.g. like wood)? Do you mean it was simply colored? Was this using the Particle Storm Lite portion of LW 5.0+? I have seen this used to create fountains and water out of hoses. I believe this is the same technology used in several animations seen at previous SIGGRAPHS where you see particles cascading down an imaginary rock face to create a waterfall. as far as I can tell, they are simply drawn as dots on the screen, but they require particle-like behaviour (wind, gravity, collision detection with other objects (I don't think they collide with each other, just other objects like a ground or rock), etc. Interparticle collision detection could be a calculation nightmare. However, with NO polygon count, rendering should be fast, just the collision detection algorithms will be time consuming. MIKE: Try something like the collision detection you have with a ground object in the current particle feature of Imagine, along with the effects of wind and gravity, but allow the collision detection to be with arbitrary object geometries. I am not a programmer, but this looks like it would be one way to go. I posted comments about Particle Storm Light for LW after the NAB last year. What I saw at the demo (on a FAST PII PC) was a small window (maybe 320x200) that had a preview animation of a source 'spewing' particles out of it. There were INTERACTIVE sliders for wind direction, velocity, gravity, color, etc. You could see the particles flying out of the source. When you added wind, the particle stream IMMEDIATELY responded in the preview. Same with gravity. same for color, including color start and end values (blue particles changing to white at the end, for example). It was VERY intuitive to allow this type of animation. The calculations must not be THAT difficult because of the speed of the interaction. And, as I pointed out above, rendering speed should be NO issue, because these are point objects, NOT faces. Just colored dots on the screen. ----------------------------------