Has anyone used Frost to mesh out a particle system and then use that as an object source in Fume? Does it work correctly? Recently on a project I was using Supermesher to mesh out a fragment system which I then ran through a Fume objectsource but Supermesher doesn’t convey it’s velocities so Fume doesn’t recognize it and therefore doesn’t create smoke/fire. (I am taking an educated guess that this happens because a new mesh is created on every frame.) I was wondering if Frost can do this?
Is there a trial I could test out? I checked the download page but didn’t see a trial listed there.
I haven’t tested this, but depending on how Frost is set up for motion blur processing, it might actually work.
Frost provides a special mode for applying velocities to the mesh to satisfy requests for sub-frame geometry by renderers like VRay or finalRender - it can create one mesh on the full frame and then shifs the vertices of that mesh according to the velocities of the closest particles on any subsequent sub-frames while preserving topology. If FumeFX is using a similar method to a renderer to acquire surface velocities (evaluating the mesh on two sub-frames within a frame interval), then it would see correct data. But it might not work if it reads the data differently…
The alternative (which we used on a current project at Prime Focus) is to try to produce a color map from the velocity channel to control the FumeFX emission. We used the XMesher to load a simulation previously saved out of TP. The XMesh Loader of course loaded the velocities that were saved by the XMesh saver, and we copied them into a Mapping channel, then used Vertex Color Map to turn them into a color which then controlled the emission in Fume. Of course you don’t have access to XMesher, but since Frost has a similar option (Copy Velocity To Map Channel), you could create a Frost object, copy the Velocity to Mapping 2, add a Material with Vertex Color Map set to channel 2 and set Fume to emit according to the color values of the map…
The trial is currently not available as link, you have to send an email to “sales AT thinkboxsoftware DOT com” to request a 5 days full-featured demo license.
Yeah for the project I just finished up I actually exported the particles as obj’s out of TP which seemed to work ok. The only issue I found using that method is that once you have 1000’s of particle FumeFX tends to grind to a halt when trying to process through that many objects. I have requested a trial/demo and will try it out this week and let you know.
