Ok since i asked for this thread i will start myself: Here is a krakatoa preset and material included–
Screenshots made with one omni light (intensity 2.0) and you will also need the Bercon Noise available here: ylilammi.com/BerconMaps.shtml
Particle cound: 800K (although 400K is almost identical result)
I guess what also would be nice to standardize this preset library, obviously material and lighting will have a high influence on the scene, maybe we create a default scene with static camera and one light to get standardized images for the preset? Also the particles and their properties will logically influence the way the preset will make them appear…
For GreenShrub for example, the result I like is with a sphere and volumetric particles, the look will change drastically when you fill the sphere with particles on a surface level (to get rid of moire effect i did a surface offset with 0.25 to -0.25), also the look presented here is scale dependant, the sphere has a radius of 15 units, making it 5units big will make the bercon pattern more visible…
Hope that many more will be coming-- I guess a krakatoa preset library would include all the settings that shape the way particles are rendered (render preset, material, magmaflow etc.) //
Does anyone has a simple gradient setup on magmaflow willing to share ,i tried to fallow the tutorial but wasnt able to get it to work software.primefocusworld.com/sof … ent_By_Age
Here is a simple example.
The scene is from Max 2010 and contains a PFlow generating particles over 100 frames including Delete operator to generate correct Age and LifeSpan.
The particles were saved to PRT files (which are included in the archive) with Position, Velocity, ID, Age and LifeSpan channels enabled.
The particles were then loaded via a PRT Loader which I also bent to allow you to see the “rainbow” better.
You will have to retarget the particles in the PRT Loader because your file path won’t match mine.
On top of the stack there is a KCM containing a MagmaFlow that takes Age and LifeSpan, converts both to Floats, divides the one by the other and dumps the resulting value as Vector into the TextureCoord channel.
A Standard material with a Gradient Ramp just like in the tutorial was assigned to the PRT Loader.
The MagmaFlow is also included, just in case you don’t have Max 2010 and have to recreate the whole scene yourself.
Going through these steps, where exactly did you fail?
I would love to improve the online example to avoid such problems in the future.
hi bobo, thanks for the help, i do understand it now better, dont know what happened that i didnt understand…
i very much like coloring these particles and defining their density over time, but it always has a “fixed” position
can you give a tip for modifying the kcm to make it dynamic? so that the age/fall off for density or rainbow color in that case, continue to go with the particles over time, instead of being static?
The Age channel contains a value which moves into the future with one frame per frame (just like with us humans).
So if you color a particle based on its age, it will “move through the color rainbow” from birth to death.
This is why as the particles are moving, they might appear to be moving “through” the color, but that is just an illusion due to the changing Age.
If the Position of the particles was static, the color would move through the particles as their Age changes over time. So it is quite relative.
If you use a static value that does not change over time to define the UV coordinates (which is the way UVs are normally used, to PIN DOWN a texture point on a vertex or particle in this case), the color will stick to the particle as it moves around. For example, you could use the ID channel converted to a Float and divided by the maximum number of particles to create a U coordinate into the Gradient Ramp that represents the order of particle birth (the later the particle was born, the farther right it would be on the gradient). Then if the particles are moving, their ID won’t change the color will stick to them.
You could use a different channel to control what gradient color will appear on each particle. Just be creative. It really depends on what kind of effect you want.
