Jahka has started documenting the new particle system at the Blender wiki. Its in the early stages and not everything is covered, but it is a good place to find information on the new system if you are testing one of the development builds.
Its also nice to know that documentation will be detailed and readily available for this flexible new particle system when it is released.
Check out the information at the wiki here.
A BlenderArtists thread has been started by Jahka in regards to the wiki documentation here.
And if you are a Window's user a new updated particles build is available at graphicall.
21 Comments
Oh Joy!!! Not Even being sarcastic or any thing. I was just messing around with particles yesterday. I would like to see that Hair cutting tool be incorporated that would be Awesome!
This should be helpful thanks :)
There is a newtonian physics option, will there be also an einsteinian physics option? :P
(probably not)
Wow! Even the initial docs are showing features I never knew I wanted like multiple particle systems on one mesh. Jahka, I tip my hat to you, sir. ^-^ I can't wait to learn about the rest.
I understand what panzi's hinting at; how else am I gonna make sure my sci-fi animation in warp speed will behave accurate.
I suggest dropping the newtonian and replace it with einstein, since it resolves to newton at low speeds anyway.
So now the question is: what should I use for my atom interaction animation?
I think we should have Newtonian, Einsteinian and Cartoon physics. q;o)
Don't forget Action Movie physics!
i only see builds.... is there a patch avaiable?
nvm found it! woot this is awesome
@ERM: No, newtonian is redundant if you have einstein.
And cartoon and action movie are just about the same right?
Let's not get crazy here, people (though I still advocate the quantum physics option.
How else am I gonna animate the tunnel effect accurately?).
@ERM: No, newton is redundant if you have einstein.
And action movies and cartoon physics are just about the same, right?
I'd still advocate quantum physics though (how else am I gonna animate the cat in the box properly?). It shouldn't be that hard to implement.
Hmmm... damn the slow page update....
@tom:
the particles rewrite is currently being maintained as a seperate branch of blender SVN as far as I'm aware.
-epat.
Just a quick question...Why no Linux build?
Wow, so you can do flocking simulations with the update?!
This is good news.
One of the limitations I encountered with the old system was that video or sequences applied as textures to the particles did not keep independent time. Instead of every particle displaying a frame of the sequence depending on its birth, every emitted particle displayed the same frame of the sequence at the same time.
I didn't notice anything in the wiki about this, so I don't know if it's being addressed or what not. However this limitation is not exclusive to Blender, and I've seen it in game engines before.
The solution has been to allow for segmented textures, say a single 1024x1024 image segmented into 64 or 128 pixels each. This has been used to allow a particle to display an independent "frame" of a segmented texture relative to it's time of birth/death.
I hope to see something like this eventually, if it's not being added already.
Apollos: this texture segmentation is indeed allready included for billboard visualization (split uvs) and in my next commit to the branch there will also be an option to change the "frame" by the angle of rotation (idea from http://www.etereaestudios.com/training_img/bosque100polys/bosque100polys.htm). There is a sort of limitation in the way animated textures are handled so that directly using movies/sequences with different timing doesn't work, but I am trying to figure out ways to circle around this limitation.
jahka: you are a gift to blender lovers everywhere, beautifully wrapped.
Yay! Took me forever to figure out how to make dynamic hair with that thing.
"an option to change the "frame" by the angle of rotation " that would be cool good for example a forest full of fake 3d billboard trees maybe you could add a generate bitmap option from selected object (with a slider for angle , from all sides, horizontally or vertically and pixel size per frame.) so you can automatically replace the objects with the particle generated billboards, that would be great for things in the distance, maybe there could even be a system that automatically swaps between 3d and 2d representation of the object acording to a preset variable.
I hope to see this new particle soon in the main build.
thx for the great work Jahka.
newtonian is good name einsteinian isnt relevant in 3d as time is already relative.
What i didnt see is a mass variable so particles could react with each other and transmit energy accordin to angle and speed of collision. doesnt need to be physically acurate( just use integers) as long as it gives artistically good results. Just my 2 cnts. keep up the good work.