Hi
For some reason I am finding this workflow a bit tricky again.I have a pflow with which changes color over time using particle age. The frost material is set to ID from MtlIndexChannel and a standard material with vertex color in the diffuse is applied to it. But for some reason it renders black. Is it just that particle age doesn’t work with frost? I also tried saving out to PRT but the color channel is coming out 0,0,0.
Please see the image for details.
Thanks
I managed to recreat the effect by saving the particles out to PRT and using magma. But I am still wondering if its possible to do without saving the particles.
Is it basically because of this does this apply to frost as well?
Yes, when using Particle Flow, you can control the color of each particle freely, but support for the built-in 3ds Max Particle Age map was removed early in the development of Krakatoa for various technical reasons.
Thanks
As long as you populate the vertex color channel. You can even do so blending 
see link:
viewtopic.php?f=89&t=4932&p=20226
NOTE: that if you are using the Nitrous viewport driver (max2012+), it will not properly display particle flow vertex colors, it is a known bug. You can however apply a hack-around with a mesher compound object to the pflow system and enable the object properties->Display Properties->Vertex Channel Display->Vertex Color
The “various technical reasons” for not supporting Age Map in Krakatoa were:
*The Age Map is looking to find the Node (scene object) that is using it in order to check whether that object is a particle system and get its Age info. This is totally a hack btw. Since the PRT Loader and all things PRT in Krakatoa are NOT particle system classes within Max (they are Geometry objects like empty EMeshes), it does not find a valid particle system object and does not work with our stuff.
*The Age Map is limited to 64K particles! (it was designed to work with the old Spray and SuperSpray and even without Krakatoa, if you make more than 64K particles in PFlow, you will experiencing problems).
@Johnny Thanks for the link, I have had a look at that before. I tried to recreate what Bobo had done in that link and for some reason I am getting UV error ie it says the frost object is missing UVs. Has something changed in 2014?
In the pflow I am using above the frost object just renders black. How can I check that the Pflow is populating the vertex color channel.
Thanks