I thought i might just make a list of some of the bugs we have found.
#1: Stoke can’t seem to see phoenix velocity fields. You can pick the phoenix obj, it just doesn’t work.
#2: If you animate a soft selection; A: Stoke goes slower B: after the last keyframe of animation, Stoke slows down about 30x slower. Duplicating the last keyframe and sliding it to the end of the sim range seems to fix the problem.
#3: The delete dead particles checkbox doesn’t seem to do anything. We are want to cull particles after they get out of frame, but they still get saved to the PRT anyway.
We heard about this from other users, too.
I will have to talk to the developer because I don’t think it was supposed to work (we only read particle data from Phoenix, and I am not sure what happens when it is picked as a velocity source).
It is already logged as a bug.
Are we talking about animated Soft Selection on the emitter mesh? Or something else?
“Delete ‘Dead’ Particles” deletes particles whose Age is greater than the LifeSpan during the simulation.
Basically when it is checked, the PRT files will have particles die after Lifespan+/- Lifespan Variation. By default this means 25+/-5, or 20 to 30 frames after birth.
When it is unchecked, the particles will not be deleted during the simulation. Their Age will continue growing beyond their Lifespan. Once the simulation is saved, you can add Magma + Krakatoa Delete modifiers to delete procedurally, and also TWEAK the Age and LifeSpan channels to make particles die earlier or later without having to re-simulate.
There is no way to delete particles when they get out of a field because technically they never do. If a field has a velocity of 0.0, the particle will stop, but won’t leave the same way PFlow would do it. This is because Stoke particles do not integrate using their own internal Velocity channel, but based on the Velocity fields’ value. So a particle outside of a grid does not continue moving, it sees no Velocity and stops.
You would have to delete the particles yourself either using PRT Loader or Magma volume culling, or using Magma test to delete particles by low velocity.
#1 Currently we are just using the phoenix field texture to transfer - seems to work ok. Just unwieldy.
#2 yes, animated soft selection. Incidentally, are there any plans to add texture support for emission?
#3 We are fine deleting the particles with magma, there just doesn’t seem to be a good workflow for not saving those deleted particles in the first place. having to re-cache the stoke to a different PRT just adds a lengthy process. Not sure what the solution is here.
#4: We can’t Stoke sim directly to the network here. There is some sort of lag between creating and renaming a file over the network that causing the caching to crap out. Maybe there is a timeout or something that needs to be extended.
#5: Would be great to have a plain old file output dialog. NOT the shitty Windows folder-picking dialog that makes it so hard to pick a folder.
I know your hands are kinda tied here, but here we just abuse a file picking dialog - so does Grant Adam with RPManager.
#6: if you click ‘cancel’ when creating a PRT loader, it creates a PRT loader anyway.
#7: If you move the stoke cache, there seems to be no way to have Stoke keep working - it must be replaced with a PRT loader