Hi
I am emitting particles off some geometry , I have applied the same material to the stoke and the objects all that is working fine. But I was expecting the simulated particles to have the colors from the texture baked in so that i didn have to use the material again. The issue is that I want to use the magnitude of the color for emission and its not working since the information is not there.
Thanks
You can do it, but you have to think of the data flow within 3ds Max to understand what is going on.
3ds Max evaluates an object from bottom to top the modifier stack like this: Base object first (that’s where the Stoke object is), then Object Space Modifiers (e.g. any Magmas, Krakatoa Delete etc.), then the World Space Transforms (in the case of Stoke this is not performed because it is already in World Space even on the Object Space stack part), then the Material is evaluated on the fly based on any UV, Position, Normal etc. channels coming up the stack. Stoke does not currently update Space Warps at all, but most other objects would continue with updating any WSMs.
So in your case, Stoke emits a particle, captures the UVs and any other mesh data channels from the source object, then the particle is baked to PRT on disk. Then the particle data goes up the stack and eventually gets the Material evaluation which sets its color dynamically. So what ends up in the PRT does not know anything about the Material yet.
To do what you asked for, you have two options - you can either evaluate a texture map to produce the particle Color within the Per-Step Magma we added to v2.3, or you can resave the Stoke particles to new PRTs using Krakatoa.
The former approach has the benefit of being faster (thanks to the parallel evaluation and saving of Stoke PRTs), but you need to set up a Magma and instantiate a Texture Map tree from the original material’s diffuse map slot into the Magma to get the color.
The latter approach would be easier as you would just keep the same setup you have now, but it would defy the performance benefits of parallel processing of Stoke, so it is probably the worse approach.
Please let me know if you need more info…
Thanks I thought i was something like that. I migh just got for the simple option for now.
I resaved the particles using Krakatoa and the colors are baked in and it renders correctly but for some reason in the particle data viewer all the color values are the same you can see it in the viewport as well. Also I think its screwing up the magma flows. Basically I am trying to add emission in the bright colors and I am getting the same level of emission all over.
You say the colors are baked in and “it” renders correctly. What renders correctly? The Stoke, or the PRT Loader of the saved file?
If the PDV shows flat colors, and the viewport shows that too, then you are obviously not saving the colors correctly for some reason.
Please clarify…
The saved PRT renders correctly and it dosent have the material on it that was on the stoke so the colors are saved just not showing up on the PDV.
Yes i am wondering why it’s not saving correctly .
