I read somewhere on Naiad video that meshing was done in houdini based using mask.
Can we have feature to do meshing based on mask? i mean only masked particles( or using image mask) participate in meshing?
Or I should do with PRT loader way by masking particles using velocity channel or else with magma modifier? So only those outputted particles only participate in meshing.
I was confused which one would be better approach? (also it would be nice to have graph/curve directly in frost which can read velocity channel of particles and generate UVs/mask directly on mesh?)
Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean by mask. Would you happen to have a link to the video?
If you want to mesh only certain particles based on their velocity, for example, you could use a Krakatoa MagmaModifier along with a Krakatoa Delete modifier.
You can generate UVs from Velocity now by using a MagmaModifier, with Velocity as the input and TextureCoord as the output. However, I’m not quite sure what you have in mind.
It may be that you want the particles to influence the mesh, just not generate the actual surface. Right now if you were to delete the particles, they would not influence the surface filtering at all.
Basically you would have some tag on a particle that would indicate if it generated mesh, influenced mesh, or neither. And this could be set with a KCM. But Frost would use all the particles that influence the mesh and use them in the levelset that gets filtered, but only voxels that contain at least one particle that can generate a mesh would be included in the marching cubes.
Thanks guys! Krakatoa Delete modifier is what I was looking for. Don’t know how I missed it.
Also is it possible to do meshing of particles using certain region box or mesh? (something like “volume select” feature to mesh only certain parts) It would be nice to have this as feature instead of using magma modifier. I would like to do that regardless of velocity or any other channels.
I am also trying to blend particles region to other plane object to frost mesh with lake/sea plane object. But it requires to use high dense plane. Any suggestions how to do this?
I just need to stitch edge of another plane to boundary of frost object.
I think we could achieve the same effect by propagating the Face Selection channel and using a DeleteMesh modifier. Do you think this would be sufficient? (Unfortunately it would be less efficient than deleting faces directly within Frost.)
Sorry, I don’t know a good way to do this using our tools. Hopefully someone who knows 3ds Max better can suggest something.
No, Frost doesn’t have any built-in volume culling. What is your particle source?
It would be a lot less efficient if you have cases where only a small number of particles actually generate the desired mesh. But I’m thinking you’d also lose out on the ability to use the intermediate state to do things like relaxation and mesh filtering and whatnot where you want to have access to the levelset and/or particle data.
I actually forgot to check on PRT loader. As my source is PRT loader, I did culling in PRT loader. As for stitching edge, It would be nice to tell frost to just glue edge of plane. (though not sure technically how it will be). Ofcourse without stitching, I can put plane besides frost too and do masking in post.
Or I just can duplicate first frame of PRT sequence and put along side of first PRT loader and add them both to make more sea near camera and for far objects just use planes.
I was wondering if it was possible to just stitch edge of plane to frost object to make it continuous geo. (without needing to detail geometry to increase vertex density?)
I just today came across that video. here is the link :: vimeo.com/36051136
and owner replies there as I quote - “You need to add a Field Mask (the container you used as a pool to hold the fluid) to the Particle Mesh 3 when your meshing out your Particle-fluid sim. Then just play with the mask params to get the desired effect… interior, exterior etc. You can also set your volume to shell or solid, with an “open top” to get different looks also… You’ll know when you get it right because you’ll still see the mesh in 3D (with depth) even though it appears as a thin surface from the camera view. ”
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