[size=200]THINKBOX SOFTWARE FROST OVERVIEW[/size]
[size=150]INTRODUCTION[/size]
FROST is a compound object for 3ds Max that can be used to generate a single mesh from particles, vertex clouds, object positions or a combination thereof using various iso-surface or geometry instancing techniques.
[size=150]SOURCES[/size]
FROST accepts particles generated by 3ds Max Particle Flow or specific PFlow events; 3ds Max legacy particle systems; Cebas Thinking Particles; Krakatoa PRT Loader, PRT Volume, PRT FumeFX and PRT Source objects.
It can also load Thinkbox’ PRT, Next Limit RealFlow’s particle BIN and ASCII CSV files from disk, combine them with other files or object sources and apply retiming and scaling to the incoming files.
In addition, FROST accepts vertices from any 3ds Max object that produces a valid TriMesh including 3ds Max Geometry and Shape primitives, Editable Meshes, Editable Polys, Patches, NURBS surfaces, Splines and Renderable Splines. This includes other FROST objects.
Finally, the 3ds Max SphereGizmo Helpers are accepted as sources of user-defined positions and radii, turning FROST into a full-featured Metaball modeler.
[size=150]MESHING MODES[/size]
FROST’s main application is the generation of iso-surfaces (also known as Metaballs or BlobMeshes) from the input data sources described above.
It provides several meshing algorithms including the standard Marching Cubes implementation, the Zhu-Bridson model and a simplified “Union Of Spheres” mode.
FROST can also be used to replace each point with a tetrahedron, box, sphere, plane, sprite or one or more custom geometry objects.
Dedicated Look At and Inherit Orientation modes allows the orientation of all geometry instances to a selected camera or arbitrary scene object, or use any available vector channel for orientation.
Finally, each input point can be turned into a simple vertex, thus producing a vertex cloud out of the position data.
FROST acquires and interpolates particle data like Velocity, Vertex Colors and Mapping Channels, automatically generating color and texture coordinates on the iso-surface as well as vertex animation for motion blur.
FROST generates actual scene geometry with separate controls for the viewport and render time quality and thus supports all applicable 3ds Max modifiers.
Particularly the Volume Select and Relax modifiers can be used to adjust the surface tension either locally or across the whole surface, something that is not possible with some render-time-only solutions.
[size=150]KRAKATOA INTEGRATION[/size]
FROST integrates well with Krakatoa, Thinkbox’ Volumetric Particle Rendering, Manipulation and Management Toolkit.
It respects all modifications that can be applied to particle data channels using Krakatoa’s PRT objects, Krakatoa Channel Modifiers, 3ds Max deformation, selection and deletion modifiers, enabling advanced control over particle properties like Position, Radius, Velocity, Color, Mapping, Orientation, Geometry Shape, Animation Timing/Offset etc.
In other words, Krakatoa’s features can be used to vastly enhance FROST’s capabilities, while FROST can extend Krakatoa by producing meshes from particles to process in polygon renderers like Default Scanline, mental ray or V-Ray.
FROST can output the Velocity data of its mesh vertices to an arbitrary Mapping Channel which in turn can be converted to a particle Velocity channel of a PRT Volume object using a Krakatoa Channels Modifier, facilitating a powerful new particles-to-blob-to-particles workflow.
[size=150]USER INTERFACE[/size]
FROST provides a streamlined UI which adapts to the current settings to reduce clutter, while featuring some of the advanced options found in the Krakatoa PRT Loader including global presets saving and loading with the ability to designate a preset as Default for new objects, as well as per-value presets saving and loading.
[size=150]PERFORMANCE[/size]
FROST is largely multi-threaded and scales well on modern multi-core machines.
It can handle moderate particle counts at interactive frame rates and can effectively produce iso-surfaces from both well-distributed, very dense and largely separated point clouds much faster than existing solutions for 3ds Max even when the particle count exceeds millions.