I was wondering if there’s any speed difference between setting up a magma flow in Field Magma as opposed to setting the same flow up in Magma on top of a PRT Loader (or a PRT Volume, PRT Hair etc.) and then splatting the velocities in Field Magma?
Tobbe
I would expect Field Magma to be faster because you would be working directly without intermediate steps.
The nature of the Magma evaluation in both places is the same under the hood, so having to jump through less hoops should lead to faster results. Also note that Field Magma can be fully procedural, while PRT Loader splatted on a grid would always be discretized.
For example, if you define a color field using particles, you will have explicit values only at the discrete particles’ positions, and an interpolated version of the field after splatting. If you would create a Field Texmap from that field, the quality of the resulting texture would depend on the Splat node’s grid size and the particle count (sample count) you defined. The same applies to a Force or Velocity field read by a Field Force SpaceWarp or a Stoke Field Follow PFlow operator.
But if you would define the same field directly in Field Magma, a Field Texmap would have nearly unlimited resolution because the field could be evaluated procedurally at any point in space (unless you use Grid-based nodes in the Magma flow). The Spacing of the Field Magma would only affect the viewport display, but the map would be significantly more precise than a splatted version of the field coming through a PRT object.
In short, use Field Magma when possible. Of course, if you need a spline converted to a field, you currently have to go through a PRT Hair to splat the tangents to a field. But using a PRT Volume+Krakatoa Magma instead of direct flow inside Field Magma would be a bad idea IMHO.
Got it, makes sense, thank you for the thorough reply!