As a newbie I wonder if it’s possible to use 3dMax textures and maps to create a field in Ember?
Did I miss something obvious?
And more general quesion - What I need is triggering an event in PFlow by texture. I did not find a reliable way except for creating a displacement w/ a map and detecting speed in PFlow to trigger my event.
But it’s not really convenient as I am not directly seeing in the viewports the maps that are supposed to trigger something so it’s a lot of guesswork.
So I thought it may be cool to do that with Ember.
We actually showed that in some of the videos, but not in much detail.
Yes, you can create a field using 3ds Max textures and esp. 3D procedural maps (Noise, Cellular etc.)
All you need to do is create an Object>TexmapEval node and connect its output to an Output node.
You can set it to output the Color as a Vector field, the Mono as a Scalar field, or the NormalPerturb as a Vector field.
It accepts inputs for the sampling point in object space (connect to Position inputChannel) if evaluating a map in object space, or TextureCoord/Vertex Color if using these as UVW coordinates. You can also add any of the 98 other mapping channels as optional inputs of your map tree needs them.
If you output the Mono value, you could connect the output to an Ember>Gradient node to produce a Vector field pointing in the direction of the biggest change!
In the basic PFlow toolset, Speed By Surface could be abused as a trigger, but it produces speed that you might not want. And it is pretty slow. In the more advanced PFlow version containing Box #3, this would be significantly easier, but not many people have Box #3 yet.
Ember is able to set the Selection channel of PFlow particles, so you can use an Ember Follow operator to load the Selection channel from the SIM Ember and then use Split Selected to send out particles.
In the SIM Ember, simply add a Selection output and connect any logical operators to it. Note that Selection is expected as a Float32, so you should convert any Logical operators through a Conert>ToFloat node.
Thanks for this suggestion.
I already used Ember to generate a neat vector field for triggering that simply generated a constant [0,0,1] force that I used via Ember Force and Force in Pflow and testing against speed >0.
This worked as a charm, but I wonder if it is acceptable solution performance-wise or I am getting into something that is very slow.
One thing I don’t understand is how to connect my map with TexmapEval?
What should I assingn the map to?