Hi all,
I was just wondering how you would go about having a different density per event. I have three events the start and the end need to be dense but the middle bit needs to be a bit wispy and see through. I thought about density over time but there is overlap in the events.
Thanks
I guess it must be too simple if no one has answered. Do particles have ID per event?
Sorry, just missed it, thanks for bumping it up.
It is indeed relatively easy. There are at least 4 ways to do it, here they are in the order of difficulty:
*In Particle View, select an Event, right-click, select Properties… and modify the Visibility value from 1.0 to, say, 0.05. Since the Visibility track of ANY object scales the Density of the particles coming from that object, you can do this with every event and you can have the density jumping from the one to the other. But you will get a hard transition. Visibility is animatable and can go above 1.0 and even below 0 in TrackView, just not in the properties dialog.
*Alternatively, since the Material Opacity also scales the Density of the particles, you can assign a different material with different Opacity value to each Event to achieve the same effect. The beauty of this approach is that you SEE that there are operators that change the Density, while in the first case the Visibility is quite hidden…
*Krakatoa provides a special operator that lets you copy the MXSFloat to Density. So you can set the custom MAXScript Float channel accessible to Script operators, or to Box #3 if you happen to have it, and drop a Krakatoa Options operator to tell Krakatoa to accept that channel as the Density channel. This way, you can do ANYTHING you want with the Density…
*You could use a different channel, for example the Mapping Channel 2, to “mark” each event with a different value. For example, in Event001, drop a Mapping operator and set the U value of channel 2 to 1.0. Then in Event002, drop a Mapping operator and set the U value to 2.0. Do the same with the other events. Then save the Mapping2 channel to PRT and use Magma to read the U component of the Mapping2 - it will tell you what event the particle came from. Then you can set the density as you want. In fact, you could even animate the V channel of the Mapping2 in PFlow from 0.0 to 1.0 and sync the animation to the Event duration. This way, in Magma you will have the normalized duration of the particle in that event as a float between 0.0 and 1.0 and you can do blending to avoid the jump in density…
I am sure there are other creative ways to achieve this, but this should be a good start…
Exporting the source’s Node ID sounds like a good feature request though!
Thanks I will give it a go.