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Particle Physics for daz 4.9 ! is this a breakthrough ?

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  • simtenerosimtenero Posts: 383
    Imago said:

    It looks absolutely awesome!

    I have a question: Obviously the particles will be "plain meshes", not metaballs or similar... There's is a way to make the particles "Look like" merged metaballs, like a pool of blood under a wounded man or tears slowly running down from a char's cheecks?

    Nope, though I agree that would be awesome :-D.  Particles are a great way to sort of "fake" fluids without requiring the horsepower of a full-on fluid simulation.  I've done a little research into fluid sims and it's not impossioble, just tricky laugh.

  • mtl1mtl1 Posts: 1,501
    simtenero said:
    mtl1 said:
    simtenero said:
    mjc1016 said:
    Peter Wade said:
    Ice Dragon Art said:

    Is this only for animations or can they be use for still photos as well?

     

    I wondered about this as well. I don't do animations but I dabbled with them a bit in Poser a long time ago. In Poser you can setup an animation, then move along the timeline and render a single frame. I expect you could do that in Daz Studio as well, set up an "animation" where the only thing that moves is the particle emitter, then move along the timeline till you found a frame where the particles were in a state that you like. But I don't know for sure that this is possible in Studio. 

    Yes it's possible.  Essentially that's what you are doing for an amimated drape for dynamic clothing.  You can drape for animation, but you end at a still image/pose.  And all that you would do is render that final frame.

    That's a very good analogy.  You can definitely use this for still renders.  Just set up your scene and run the animation script from frame X (where you have your scene set up) to frame Y, then render any frame between X and Y that looks good to you.  How many frames will depend on the effect you're going for.

     

    mtl1 said:

    If anyone's interested in this stuff, take a look at mCasual's stuff in the Freebies section. I believe he also has some collision/physics based stuff, but no particle simulations.

    The make-or-break with this particle physics package is the amount of computational power required, as well as deformations of the particles.

    Agreed, collision detection can be very CPU intensive.  I've incorporated several different optimization routines to keep it as speedy as possible, but obviously it's going to vary a lot depending on how many objects you want to collide, how many faces each has, the number of particles, etc.  I've made some recommendations in the documentation.  I think collision primitives are a great way to speed up collisions.  It takes some extra time to set up, but it can really be worth it in complex scenes.  In my promo images, I used a combination of collision primitives and decimated LODs.

    I've started up a commercial thread, but I'll also be sure to check in on this thread as well :-)

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/80416/simtenero-particle-physics-commercial

    Hi Sim :) I'm not sure if you answered this question yet, but you mentioned that the particles do change scale over time... so does this script also accomodate deformations due to mutual particle collisions?

    Also, I have some background as an electromag simulator using FEA, so this product is really piquing my interest.

    Hi mtl1!

    Meaning the deformation of the mesh shape, or deformation of the particle positions?  The particle's don't self-collide.  I tinkered with both self-collision and mesh/mesh collision, but both increased simulation time by orders of magnitude when dealing with lots of particles and/or colliders, so I decided that level of detail might be overkill for this application.  Instead, the particles are single points in space and the mesh is really just a renderable representation of that location.  So all collisions are point (particle) mesh (collider).

    Thank you :)

  • IvyIvy Posts: 7,159
    edited April 2016
    simtenero said:
    Ivy said:

    I have some questions about this product http://www.daz3d.com/simtenero-particle-physics-the-complete-bundle

    I am seriously considering purchasing this, it looks like something I've been wishing for a long time.,  . But I have a few questions.

    1) Can I apply my own custom textures to the particle effect ..  example. if I wanted to change  from water texture to a milk or fire textures, can that be done?

    2) Can the particles be morphed into shapes? like snow flakes or  Fire works, stars, or maybe leaves?

    3) Can the particle movements be managed? .. example the  effect speed, effect length or effect size, Bounce distances etc. user controlled for customized effects or its a one preset feature for each effect and no user controls?

    The product description did not really answer any of these questions.   Thank you for your time reading my questions,

     

    Hello Ivy!

    Some quick answers for you:

    1. Yep, you can modify the particle materials a few different ways.  The simplest is to change the material on the Emitter itself, then use the "Copy Emitter Material to Particles" option in the animation script.  You can also select individual materials and tweak their surface settings.  You can use texture maps as well, though I'd recommend avoiding it or, at least, using very small maps (to reduce memory requirements when you go to render the scene).

    2. Unfortunately, no.  The shapes themselves have some unique setup requirements in order to function properly in the simulation.  So it is limited to the shape presets included with the engine and emitter packs.

    3. Yes! :-)  There are some basic options in the animation script, but if you look in the Parameters Pane for the Emitter, you'll find tons of options to tweak!  It can take some experimentation to figure out which parameter does what, but I've included some explanations in the documentation to hopefully make that process easier.  The Emitter Presets don't require all of that tweaking, they are ready to animate, but the options are there for anyone who really wants to dig in and come up with their own emitters laugh

    Thank you for your reply , I am very interested in your effect bundle and plan to purchase it as soon as i get paid . I have a couple more questions.  Do you plan on making more shape presets in the future. it looks like you offer some great shapes in this bundle now will you be adding any leave shapes or a Flat pane shape to add fire textures?

    My second question is would adding transparency maps in the material on the Emitter itself, then use the "Copy Emitter Material to Particles" option help reduce memory usage for like fire or smoke texture or will it not matter?   I know you said there are some basic controls in "Parameters Pane" for the Emitter.  are there any collision controls to reduce or increase the amount of collision or bounce?  and my last question..lol   I see in the controls sections in the PDF that I can reduce or increase the number of particles per seconds which maybe a good way to reduce ram usage. is there a limit on how far we can reduce or increase the particles per minute so to emulate Snow fall or increase it to look more soild and can the particle presets be layered or can I use more than one preset in the same scene to make a cascading waterfall

    Thank you for your time in answering my questions

    Post edited by Ivy on
  • BeeMKayBeeMKay Posts: 6,998
    edited April 2016

    My experience so far:

    • Using it
      • Very easy handling. The documentation that comes with the product is very useful and quickly gives results.
      • I've tested it with DS 4.8, in which it works fine, except for changing the materials. I've tried to apply the Iray smoke shader, but it still kept giving me the blue default material, no matter if I delete the emitter, or not. I haven't had the time to test it thoroughly, or in 4.9.
      • Trying to delete several particle pools simultaniously makes my DS freeze (16GB memory). Creating several particle pools, and rendering them works fine.
      • This seems to have been thought out very thoroughly, and there are lots of options in the Parameter tab to tinker with.

    Here are some images:

    After loading the emitter, and setting up the simulation according to the documentation. Note that the default setting of particle life is 1.1, which exeeds the default length of animation of 1 second (30 frames). Either increase the frame rate in the settings, or reduce the particle lifetime.

    After the simulator has done its thing, I switch over to the animation tab, and go through the frames to select the one that looks best to me.

    A quick preview render shows that the emittor will not render with the particles. Also, the emitter can be deleted, but the particles it created will remain in the animation frame. That comes in very handy if you want to combine effects. Here, I have rendered the stream with different acceleration, so one goes farther than the other.

    Trying to delete several of the created groups at the same time made my DS freeze (not the system, btw). Like I said, I haven't tested this in 4.9, so I don't know if this is a 4.8 problem.

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    Post edited by BeeMKay on
  • goose_chasegoose_chase Posts: 84

    It's fine for still pictures; they don't do the utility justice, though. The fun is in bouncing the streams off objects to hit characters in the face and that.

    The script took about half an hour faffing about number crunching to pour a bucket of stars over Haiku here, taking up practically no GPU or RAM to do so, so it'll run fine on most machines I expect. I ended up moving her in this particular test render, so there's some star embedding going on with her hair that wasn't there with the original pose.

    You can terrorize your cutesy J-pop dancers on stage with star bombs, luzz ball lightning into some lizardman's face, kind of simulate throwing a bucket of water over an unsuspecting sunbather - or better, simulate the effects of close raindrops on the camera lens - it's fairly specific confetti at the moment.

    I'd certainly recommend it for animation; stills work only mmmaybe not, not at the moment. It's currently not doing much in still images that other props can't do better, but yeah, you probably weren't buying a fluid physics simulator for static work anyway.

    As a feat of scripting, it's pretty awesome, good job. Little hearts, and little stylized psychedelic flowers please.

    become an idol they said be a star they said.jpg
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  • IvyIvy Posts: 7,159

    Awesome info thank you very much. . Is there a collision control or modifier?

  • simtenerosimtenero Posts: 383
    Ivy said:
    simtenero said:
    Ivy said:

    I have some questions about this product http://www.daz3d.com/simtenero-particle-physics-the-complete-bundle

    I am seriously considering purchasing this, it looks like something I've been wishing for a long time.,  . But I have a few questions.

    1) Can I apply my own custom textures to the particle effect ..  example. if I wanted to change  from water texture to a milk or fire textures, can that be done?

    2) Can the particles be morphed into shapes? like snow flakes or  Fire works, stars, or maybe leaves?

    3) Can the particle movements be managed? .. example the  effect speed, effect length or effect size, Bounce distances etc. user controlled for customized effects or its a one preset feature for each effect and no user controls?

    The product description did not really answer any of these questions.   Thank you for your time reading my questions,

     

    Hello Ivy!

    Some quick answers for you:

    1. Yep, you can modify the particle materials a few different ways.  The simplest is to change the material on the Emitter itself, then use the "Copy Emitter Material to Particles" option in the animation script.  You can also select individual materials and tweak their surface settings.  You can use texture maps as well, though I'd recommend avoiding it or, at least, using very small maps (to reduce memory requirements when you go to render the scene).

    2. Unfortunately, no.  The shapes themselves have some unique setup requirements in order to function properly in the simulation.  So it is limited to the shape presets included with the engine and emitter packs.

    3. Yes! :-)  There are some basic options in the animation script, but if you look in the Parameters Pane for the Emitter, you'll find tons of options to tweak!  It can take some experimentation to figure out which parameter does what, but I've included some explanations in the documentation to hopefully make that process easier.  The Emitter Presets don't require all of that tweaking, they are ready to animate, but the options are there for anyone who really wants to dig in and come up with their own emitters laugh

    Thank you for your reply , I am very interested in your effect bundle and plan to purchase it as soon as i get paid . I have a couple more questions.  Do you plan on making more shape presets in the future. it looks like you offer some great shapes in this bundle now will you be adding any leave shapes or a Flat pane shape to add fire textures?

    My second question is would adding transparency maps in the material on the Emitter itself, then use the "Copy Emitter Material to Particles" option help reduce memory usage for like fire or smoke texture or will it not matter?   I know you said there are some basic controls in "Parameters Pane" for the Emitter.  are there any collision controls to reduce or increase the amount of collision or bounce?  and my last question..lol   I see in the controls sections in the PDF that I can reduce or increase the number of particles per seconds which maybe a good way to reduce ram usage. is there a limit on how far we can reduce or increase the particles per minute so to emulate Snow fall or increase it to look more soild and can the particle presets be layered or can I use more than one preset in the same scene to make a cascading waterfall

    Thank you for your time in answering my questions

    No problem laugh.  Adding transparency maps to the emitter would still result in an instance for each particle.  I'll have to check this, but I think if you were to select all of the particles post-simulation you could paste a shared material to all of them.  That can be pretty slow, though, and you'd lose transparency and color change animations.  If you are using Iray, you should be able to get some very good smoke effects using transmission settings (though they are slow to render, they look very nice :-) ).

    For collisions, you can set "bounceLoss", which will affect how bouncy the particles are.  If you look at some of the existing emitters, you can get a sense of how that works.  Try comparing the settings to the water emitters to the default emitters, for example, and you can see the impact of bounceLoss.

    You change the number of emits by quite a lot!  The default limits are 1 through 500.  You can also run the same simulations multiple times to thicken up a particle stream (I tend to prefer several small simulations to one giant one, gives you a chance to review and make sure it looks right).

  • simtenerosimtenero Posts: 383
    BeeMKay said:

    My experience so far:

    • Using it
      • Very easy handling. The documentation that comes with the product is very useful and quickly gives results.
      • I've tested it with DS 4.8, in which it works fine, except for changing the materials. I've tried to apply the Iray smoke shader, but it still kept giving me the blue default material, no matter if I delete the emitter, or not. I haven't had the time to test it thoroughly, or in 4.9.
      • Trying to delete several particle pools simultaniously makes my DS freeze (16GB memory). Creating several particle pools, and rendering them works fine.
      • This seems to have been thought out very thoroughly, and there are lots of options in the Parameter tab to tinker with.

     

    Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and for the screencaps, BeeMKay!  It does work in 4.8, but my "official line" is going to be 4.9 and up.  I may have updates that are specific to 4.9 and I don't want to catch anyone off guard :-).  I hadn't run into that delete issue, but I think I was deleting them one at a time.  I'll see if there's anything on my end that could be done to improve that (will have to experiment first though, it may not be something I can affect).  Also, keep in mind you can reuse existing particles pools, so you don't necessarily have to delete and recreate each time (unless you want to combine multiple simulations).

    About the particle color, two things to check.  The base diffuse color is actually set in the parameters pane under "matStartColor," rather than in the surfaces pane, so give that a shot (same applies to Opacity).  Also, after you've made changes to the emitter material, be sure to check "Copy Emitter Material to Particles" in the Animation script.

  • simtenerosimtenero Posts: 383
    Ivy said:

    Awesome info thank you very much. . Is there a collision control or modifier?

    Yep, you can control which objects are collided with, how many times each particle can collide, and how much gravitational velocity is lost on each collision (to alter the "bounciness :-) ).

  • goose_chasegoose_chase Posts: 84

     

    Ivy said:

    Awesome info thank you very much. . Is there a collision control or modifier?

    Like what they just said.

    It's dead easy to set up. The script opens up an options screen, and you just play around with the sliders and tick boxes.

    star_bomb_option_screens.jpg
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  • simtenerosimtenero Posts: 383
    goose_chase said:

    It's fine for still pictures; they don't do the utility justice, though. The fun is in bouncing the streams off objects to hit characters in the face and that.

    The script took about half an hour faffing about number crunching to pour a bucket of stars over Haiku here, taking up practically no GPU or RAM to do so, so it'll run fine on most machines I expect. I ended up moving her in this particular test render, so there's some star embedding going on with her hair that wasn't there with the original pose.

    You can terrorize your cutesy J-pop dancers on stage with star bombs, luzz ball lightning into some lizardman's face, kind of simulate throwing a bucket of water over an unsuspecting sunbather - or better, simulate the effects of close raindrops on the camera lens - it's fairly specific confetti at the moment.

    I'd certainly recommend it for animation; stills work only mmmaybe not, not at the moment. It's currently not doing much in still images that other props can't do better, but yeah, you probably weren't buying a fluid physics simulator for static work anyway.

    As a feat of scripting, it's pretty awesome, good job. Little hearts, and little stylized psychedelic flowers please.

    Thank you for the feedback and test render, goose_chase!

    Check out the "Optimizing Collisions" section in the guide, you might be able to speed up the simulation considerably :-).  Heads and hair end up being some of the more intensive colliders because they have lots of fine details and are made of multiple objects.  If you have Decimator, try decimating the figure and hair before running the simulation.  I've done this quite a bit and it works great! (Just remember to return to the Base or High LOD before you run your runder, unless you dig the PS1 look laugh).

  • goose_chasegoose_chase Posts: 84

    Aha! Yep, that's clever. Or aim for less fussy collision sites in future. tbh half an hour for a complex pathing calculation is pretty good in 3D modeling time.

    And I've just seen that the scale slider goes backwards too, so yes, the bucket of water will definitely work next time.

    Good job.

  • BeeMKayBeeMKay Posts: 6,998
    simtenero said:
    BeeMKay said:

    My experience so far:

    • Using it
      • Very easy handling. The documentation that comes with the product is very useful and quickly gives results.
      • I've tested it with DS 4.8, in which it works fine, except for changing the materials. I've tried to apply the Iray smoke shader, but it still kept giving me the blue default material, no matter if I delete the emitter, or not. I haven't had the time to test it thoroughly, or in 4.9.
      • Trying to delete several particle pools simultaniously makes my DS freeze (16GB memory). Creating several particle pools, and rendering them works fine.
      • This seems to have been thought out very thoroughly, and there are lots of options in the Parameter tab to tinker with.

     

    Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and for the screencaps, BeeMKay!  It does work in 4.8, but my "official line" is going to be 4.9 and up.  I may have updates that are specific to 4.9 and I don't want to catch anyone off guard :-).  I hadn't run into that delete issue, but I think I was deleting them one at a time.  I'll see if there's anything on my end that could be done to improve that (will have to experiment first though, it may not be something I can affect).  Also, keep in mind you can reuse existing particles pools, so you don't necessarily have to delete and recreate each time (unless you want to combine multiple simulations).

    About the particle color, two things to check.  The base diffuse color is actually set in the parameters pane under "matStartColor," rather than in the surfaces pane, so give that a shot (same applies to Opacity).  Also, after you've made changes to the emitter material, be sure to check "Copy Emitter Material to Particles" in the Animation script.

     

    The material translated properly after using the "Copy Emitter Material to Particles, though it seems that some shader work better in 4.9 than in 4.8..

    I've also now tested this very briefly in 4.9, and the simulation runs a lot faster there than in 4.8.

    What I like is that you can delete the emitter and save the created bubbles as subset. The subset will retain the animation, so you can easily run the simulation, and add it into any scene you wish to render later,without having to run the simulation with the entire scene loaded. you just go to the desired frame. You also can move around each particle group, and even each particle can be manipulated in size and position (and even the color, though not the material).

    I don't know if it's possible to save a single frame, if you want to safe just a specific position (if there's a way, then that would certainly be great).

  • IvyIvy Posts: 7,159
    simtenero said:
    Ivy said:
    simtenero said:
    Ivy said:

    I have some questions about this product http://www.daz3d.com/simtenero-particle-physics-the-complete-bundle

    I am seriously considering purchasing this, it looks like something I've been wishing for a long time.,  . But I have a few questions.

    1) Can I apply my own custom textures to the particle effect ..  example. if I wanted to change  from water texture to a milk or fire textures, can that be done?

    2) Can the particles be morphed into shapes? like snow flakes or  Fire works, stars, or maybe leaves?

    3) Can the particle movements be managed? .. example the  effect speed, effect length or effect size, Bounce distances etc. user controlled for customized effects or its a one preset feature for each effect and no user controls?

    The product description did not really answer any of these questions.   Thank you for your time reading my questions,

     

    Hello Ivy!

    Some quick answers for you:

    1. Yep, you can modify the particle materials a few different ways.  The simplest is to change the material on the Emitter itself, then use the "Copy Emitter Material to Particles" option in the animation script.  You can also select individual materials and tweak their surface settings.  You can use texture maps as well, though I'd recommend avoiding it or, at least, using very small maps (to reduce memory requirements when you go to render the scene).

    2. Unfortunately, no.  The shapes themselves have some unique setup requirements in order to function properly in the simulation.  So it is limited to the shape presets included with the engine and emitter packs.

    3. Yes! :-)  There are some basic options in the animation script, but if you look in the Parameters Pane for the Emitter, you'll find tons of options to tweak!  It can take some experimentation to figure out which parameter does what, but I've included some explanations in the documentation to hopefully make that process easier.  The Emitter Presets don't require all of that tweaking, they are ready to animate, but the options are there for anyone who really wants to dig in and come up with their own emitters laugh

    Thank you for your reply , I am very interested in your effect bundle and plan to purchase it as soon as i get paid . I have a couple more questions.  Do you plan on making more shape presets in the future. it looks like you offer some great shapes in this bundle now will you be adding any leave shapes or a Flat pane shape to add fire textures?

    My second question is would adding transparency maps in the material on the Emitter itself, then use the "Copy Emitter Material to Particles" option help reduce memory usage for like fire or smoke texture or will it not matter?   I know you said there are some basic controls in "Parameters Pane" for the Emitter.  are there any collision controls to reduce or increase the amount of collision or bounce?  and my last question..lol   I see in the controls sections in the PDF that I can reduce or increase the number of particles per seconds which maybe a good way to reduce ram usage. is there a limit on how far we can reduce or increase the particles per minute so to emulate Snow fall or increase it to look more soild and can the particle presets be layered or can I use more than one preset in the same scene to make a cascading waterfall

    Thank you for your time in answering my questions

    No problem laugh.  Adding transparency maps to the emitter would still result in an instance for each particle.  I'll have to check this, but I think if you were to select all of the particles post-simulation you could paste a shared material to all of them.  That can be pretty slow, though, and you'd lose transparency and color change animations.  If you are using Iray, you should be able to get some very good smoke effects using transmission settings (though they are slow to render, they look very nice :-) ).

    For collisions, you can set "bounceLoss", which will affect how bouncy the particles are.  If you look at some of the existing emitters, you can get a sense of how that works.  Try comparing the settings to the water emitters to the default emitters, for example, and you can see the impact of bounceLoss.

    You change the number of emits by quite a lot!  The default limits are 1 through 500.  You can also run the same simulations multiple times to thicken up a particle stream (I tend to prefer several small simulations to one giant one, gives you a chance to review and make sure it looks right).

    Thank you very much for all you help .. I get paid Friday :)

  • Eustace ScrubbEustace Scrubb Posts: 2,689
    simtenero said:
    Imago said:

    It looks absolutely awesome!

    I have a question: Obviously the particles will be "plain meshes", not metaballs or similar... There's is a way to make the particles "Look like" merged metaballs, like a pool of blood under a wounded man or tears slowly running down from a char's cheecks?

    Nope, though I agree that would be awesome :-D.  Particles are a great way to sort of "fake" fluids without requiring the horsepower of a full-on fluid simulation.  I've done a little research into fluid sims and it's not impossioble, just tricky laugh.

    I'd just get mjcasual's free metaball plug-in (it works great, but metas themselves take learning anywhere) and hang a metaball from each particle, then hide the particles themselves.  Splat!  "Liquids!"

     

  • RuphussRuphuss Posts: 2,631

    how much gpu load for iray renders does this use ?

     

    and it would be nice to see a little movie clip

    show your creativity please

  • ImagoImago Posts: 4,954
    Eustace Scrubb said:
    simtenero said:
    Imago said:

    It looks absolutely awesome!

    I have a question: Obviously the particles will be "plain meshes", not metaballs or similar... There's is a way to make the particles "Look like" merged metaballs, like a pool of blood under a wounded man or tears slowly running down from a char's cheecks?

    Nope, though I agree that would be awesome :-D.  Particles are a great way to sort of "fake" fluids without requiring the horsepower of a full-on fluid simulation.  I've done a little research into fluid sims and it's not impossioble, just tricky laugh.

    I'd just get mjcasual's free metaball plug-in (it works great, but metas themselves take learning anywhere) and hang a metaball from each particle, then hide the particles themselves.  Splat!  "Liquids!"

     

    So the particles can be handled and modified after calculation of the physics? I already have MCasual's metaball plugin, but it was very hard to use due the difficulty to "re-enact" a fluid behaviour!

  • JeremyDJeremyD Posts: 265
    goose_chase said:

    It's fine for still pictures; they don't do the utility justice, though. The fun is in bouncing the streams off objects to hit characters in the face and that.

    The script took about half an hour faffing about number crunching to pour a bucket of stars over Haiku here, taking up practically no GPU or RAM to do so, so it'll run fine on most machines I expect. I ended up moving her in this particular test render, so there's some star embedding going on with her hair that wasn't there with the original pose.

    You can terrorize your cutesy J-pop dancers on stage with star bombs, luzz ball lightning into some lizardman's face, kind of simulate throwing a bucket of water over an unsuspecting sunbather - or better, simulate the effects of close raindrops on the camera lens - it's fairly specific confetti at the moment.

    I'd certainly recommend it for animation; stills work only mmmaybe not, not at the moment. It's currently not doing much in still images that other props can't do better, but yeah, you probably weren't buying a fluid physics simulator for static work anyway.

    As a feat of scripting, it's pretty awesome, good job. Little hearts, and little stylized psychedelic flowers please.

    Nice work! This plug in has me very interested. I used to use Blender for particle physics but Blender is such a PIA to use.

    Also semi OT, but is that a Daz figure in your avatar? I really like the look.

  • Sphinx MagooSphinx Magoo Posts: 575

    Just a quick note to say that I picked up the package and it runs well on my old PC. I have a Gateway PC that I got in 2005 and it runs the particle generations at a pretty decent clip. I plan on reading the directions so I know what I'm doing next time.

    A couple of comments/questions:

    1) Are further expansions planned? I sure hope so. Being able to pick from a library of presets would help make it appealing to casual users.

    2) A metaball expansion would be super. I was a big fan of the Poser plug-in, Metaflow (I think?), and there were some delightful effects I could create from it. It was great for fire effects!

    3) Is there a way to make a figure a particle emitter? This is something Metaflow could do. I think it would use a geometry shell to generate the particles off of. It could be used for create force fields or to generate a human torch effect.

    Thanks!

     

     

  • goose_chasegoose_chase Posts: 84
    JeremyD said:

    Nice work! This plug in has me very interested. I used to use Blender for particle physics but Blender is such a PIA to use

    Also semi OT, but is that a Daz figure in your avatar? I really like the look.

    It'll be interesting to see what folks who are confident with animating make with it. Bouncing stars off of a convenient hat in another test today vastly reduced the calculation time down to below three minutes. It's fast with non-complex surface interactions.

    Oh, and yeah, hah. She was a happy accident playing around with Iray plastic shaders trying to recreate the Super Dollfie / Dollmore look.

    It's a glossy enamel lamp plastic shader from IG Iray Lights and Shaders - Floor Lamps. I can't remember if I ctrl-clicked it or not to presevre the textures. Probably. Either that, or it's straight plastic re-shading with LIE make up, possibly from the fun candy cane set. It's Keiko again (I bloody love Keiko). There's a recent SSS Iray pack that looks promising too, it allows for different grades of plastic transparency, but I haven't tested it on a figure yet; trees and fruit come out really well, like, wow well.

    Attached: look but don't touch: a four thousand dollar custom Dollmore. Not mine. Yet. Euromillions tonight.

     

    dollmore_dollarsless.jpg
    600 x 900 - 148K
  • JeremyDJeremyD Posts: 265
    goose_chase said:
    JeremyD said:

    Nice work! This plug in has me very interested. I used to use Blender for particle physics but Blender is such a PIA to use

    Also semi OT, but is that a Daz figure in your avatar? I really like the look.

    It'll be interesting to see what folks who are confident with animating make with it. Bouncing stars off of a convenient hat in another test today vastly reduced the calculation time down to below three minutes. It's fast with non-complex surface interactions.

    Oh, and yeah, hah. She was a happy accident playing around with Iray plastic shaders trying to recreate the Super Dollfie / Dollmore look.

    It's a glossy enamel lamp plastic shader from IG Iray Lights and Shaders - Floor Lamps. I can't remember if I ctrl-clicked it or not to presevre the textures. Probably. Either that, or it's straight plastic re-shading with LIE make up, possibly from the fun candy cane set. It's Keiko again (I bloody love Keiko). There's a recent SSS Iray pack that looks promising too, it allows for different grades of plastic transparency, but I haven't tested it on a figure yet; trees and fruit come out really well, like, wow well.

    Attached: look but don't touch: a four thousand dollar custom Dollmore. Not mine. Yet. Euromillions tonight.

     

    Thank you :) Keiko looks like a great model, sadly out of my budget! Wish listed instead.

    I am pretty excited about the development of Simtenero's particle simulator. One of my biggest wishes for Daz is to include more features that you can find in other 3D programs and so I'm happy to see it happening and how it'll evolve.

    If liquids are next - that would be amazing and I can finally put Blender out to pasture.

  • Herald of FireHerald of Fire Posts: 3,504

    This is very exciting stuff indeed. I've been after some physics based goodies for as long as I've been a DS user (a good few years now!). While it's a bit out of my budget for this month, you can bet your last dollar I'll be picking it up come pay day. I can't wait to try it out for myself!

  • kyoto kidkyoto kid Posts: 40,678
    Eustace Scrubb said:
    simtenero said:
    Imago said:

    It looks absolutely awesome!

    I have a question: Obviously the particles will be "plain meshes", not metaballs or similar... There's is a way to make the particles "Look like" merged metaballs, like a pool of blood under a wounded man or tears slowly running down from a char's cheecks?

    Nope, though I agree that would be awesome :-D.  Particles are a great way to sort of "fake" fluids without requiring the horsepower of a full-on fluid simulation.  I've done a little research into fluid sims and it's not impossioble, just tricky laugh.

    I'd just get mjcasual's free metaball plug-in (it works great, but metas themselves take learning anywhere) and hang a metaball from each particle, then hide the particles themselves.  Splat!  "Liquids!"

     

    ...everytime I see "metaballs" I read it as "meatballs".

    ...hmmm, bouncing meatballs, might have something there. Have them splash into a lake of marinara sauce surrounded by spaghetti and linguini noodles growing on the shore like reeds wafting in the breeze under a shower of grated Parmigiano Reggiano.

  • Sphinx MagooSphinx Magoo Posts: 575
    kyoto kid said:
    Eustace Scrubb said:
    simtenero said:
    Imago said:

    It looks absolutely awesome!

    I have a question: Obviously the particles will be "plain meshes", not metaballs or similar... There's is a way to make the particles "Look like" merged metaballs, like a pool of blood under a wounded man or tears slowly running down from a char's cheecks?

    Nope, though I agree that would be awesome :-D.  Particles are a great way to sort of "fake" fluids without requiring the horsepower of a full-on fluid simulation.  I've done a little research into fluid sims and it's not impossioble, just tricky laugh.

    I'd just get mjcasual's free metaball plug-in (it works great, but metas themselves take learning anywhere) and hang a metaball from each particle, then hide the particles themselves.  Splat!  "Liquids!"

     

    ...everytime I see "metaballs" I read it as "meatballs".

    ...hmmm, bouncing meatballs, might have something there. Have them splash into a lake of marinara sauce surrounded by spaghetti and linguini noodles growing on the shore like reeds wafting in the breeze under a shower of grated Parmigiano Reggiano.

    Darn it. Now I want meatballs. I haven't even had breakfast yet...  sad

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