I have a couple of PRT Loaders that I got going into Frost to create a mesh from RealFlow particles. Now I would like to convert that mesh into a bunch of particles and render it Krakatoa style (as a bunch of little particles rather than as a mesh). I would like those particles to have some additional fluid turbulence beyond simply converting the Frost into a PRTVolume and rendering that in Krakatoa.
I can get Stoke to create particles within the volume of the Frost object. I am using the Frost object directly as the Distribution source for Stoke (I was initially using my PRTVolume made from the Frost object).
However, these particles Stoke is making do not have any of the original velocity from the RealFlow particles. I can get them to move with the Wind Space Warp I am using as the velocity field, though.
Oh, now I am thinking out loud. Do I need to also add another velocity field that is PRT Loaders (which loaded the original RF particles)??
Any thoughts on achieving this? Imagine RealFlow as Krakatoa particles, with little fluid dynamics trubulence coming off them on the edges…
It seems that Adding the PRTLoaders (loading the RF particles) worked real well to pick up the velocities.
Simulating just seems to take a while… Even 100 particles per frame is not much slower than 1000…
Just wondering how to best optimize that… Oh, perhaps it is Frost that is taking so long… I bet I could lower my Frost quality settings for use with Stoke vs. for rendering a mesh… likely by a lot!
Keep in mind that Stoke turns the Frost into RENDER mode when you simulate if the checkbox “Emit From Viewport Particles” is not checked. So the Frost mesh you see in the viewport might be a lot faster to build than the one you are simulating with! Make sure the Frost meshing settings for Rendering match the Viewport settings (there is a checkbox that says “Render Using Viewport Settings”!)
Alternatively, you can emit from the original PRT Loaders with a slight Jitter Radius, without using Frost at all. Particles will be created around the original BIN file particles, and if you check the option to respect the IDs, the creation will only happen when a new particles is born in RealFlow. This way, the RealFlow particles won’t create trails in Stoke, but “replicate” in a small spherical area around the original birth location, then just move along.
That makes sense. I may try the PARTLoader directly (bypassing Frost). Just to see what that looks like.
Right now I am trying to get my vertex colors (used for the two emitters) out of Stoke.
I have each of the loader using Magma to assign a vertex color (1,1,1 and 0,0,0). I got these into Frost OK. But now I am having trouble getting these into Stoke to then be used with a global color override in Krakatoa (using a Mix).
I tried adding Magma to the Stoke object, and then tried an input of color, and output of material 2 (which I use in my Mix). Oddly sometimes the output for Material 2 decides it wants a single float, whereas other times it wants an array of three floats. Even when I got it to want an array it still didn’t work (when it wants a single float I got a type mismatch error).
Note that I have all the channels turned of in Stoke… None of them seem to be called vertex color.
Any ideas there? I want to get the vertex colors for the two different RF emitters through to the renderer.
Also, is using a Override Color the best way to texture the particles? Can you apply materials directly to the stoke object? That didn’t seem to do much. (Sorry, I am new to Max as well; so I may be missing something obvious.)
By the way, Pick By Name for Distribution sources does not seem to work with hidden objects. Even if I turn on Show hidden objects in the pick list… I can select the objects, but they do not show up in the Distribution list… Would be nice if they would. (Maybe this is a Max thing?)
So using the PRTLoaders directly revealed the Color channel in the channels list in Stoke. This gets the colors through. I am thinking to get the colors out of Frost I may have to use the separate PRTVolume method rather than adding the Frost object directly to the distribution list?
When you pick a Frost mesh, if there was a mapping channel generated on the PRT Loaders that it is meshing, that channel should appear in Stoke.
The thing to keep in mind is that Stoke samples the channels ONLY at birth, not throughout the simulation. So if you expect a channel to change over time, it won’t. But since the Mapping is only used to signify the source and allow for some form of mixing of materials, that should work.
I just tested it by adding Mapping2 to the PRT Loaders, Frosting them, then checking Mapping2 in Stoke to acquire the data from the Frost mesh (it uses the closest point on the surface).
So keep in mind that while you are creating in a volume, you are getting your data from the surrounding surface (like the Holographic universe hypothesis - everything happens on a surface around the universe )
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