I have a quick question. Is there a way to have the particles inherit the color information of the lights in the scene additively? I’m thinking about Adam from Evermotions waterfall scene in particular. In his Krakatoa render it seems as though the particles inherit the golden color from one light on highlighted areas, and the blue fill from another and shadows. I’ve done the workaound of mapping color values from velocity, but they don’t seem to reach the same effect Adam did in his renders. Am I missing something?
There is really no trick - Adam used a mesh of the rocks behind the particles as Matte object. This casts a lot of additional mesh-to-particles shadows, occluding either the one light or the other. It results in the nice blue/orange blend of colors. But it is really just masterful lighting, no special tricks in Krakatoa itself. Turning off Matte Objects would produce a very different result since there would be a lot less shadowing (only particles-to-particles), and the two light sources would mix a lot more, producing more white and less contrast of cool/warm colors…
When I was rendering the scene for testing purposes, I also mixed some Emission to keep the shadows from getting too dark.