Uh oh. Management problem…
I have a disk cache rendered for frames 0-100, and a “static” disk cache. One frame.
I want to render the particles, but from frames 60-160.
So… I have to rename my 0-100 caches, and make hard links or copies of the static caches so that it repeats.
As you can see, it’s all ick.
Could we get either an IFL-like cache reading list, or better yet, get trackview nodes for the caches, so I can set ranges?
Generic answer:
Next beta will have Particle Cache Loading implemented as a scene object. Each Particle Loader object will be able to load an arbitrary number of particle files, and you will be able to create an arbitrary number of Loaders.
Each Loader will have separate Viewport and Render settings for Particle Percentage and Limit, Color Source (Node’s wirecolor, Saved Colors, Node’s Material Self-Illum channel), will have the option to ignore or respect the node’s transformation (so you can have as many particle files linked to as many nodes as you want), and of course, separate timing controls per Loader.
As you would expect, all Loaders will be capable of showing a Percentage of the particles as color points in the viewport for realtime feedback :o)
You will be able to instance Loaders, disable the particle viewport display and rendering per node and some other useful things…
Stay tuned!
By color points, do you mean the particles in the viewports (i like dots) will show the color/opacity of their stored values?
Yes. Currently, they will show the RGB color only.
Don’t think we are doing anything with opacity yet (that would be close to realtime Krakatoa rendering in viewports so I think it is out of scope for now)
Cheers,
Borislav “Bobo” Petrov
Technical Director 3D VFX
Frantic Films Winnipeg
Not entirely. First off, you would be lacking the illumination and filtering, and second, Krakatoa is, in theory, able to render billions of particles. My video card gets sluggish before it hits 3 million viewport dots.
Many point based renderers (actually, all the ones I’ve seen in the past 3 years other than Krakatoa) are rendered in hardware, so it wouldn’t be terribly odd at that point either, but I don’t need Krakatoa to be a viewport renderer, I need it to be something that I can render on Deadline with.
The challenge here is that 3ds Max doesn’t give direct access to the hardware. I may be missing something, but it looks like the provided facilities aren’t enough to the hardware rendering in the viewport in the way that would be necessary.
We once implemented a similar plugin for Maya, which provides the opengl context directly, and there we were able to get near-realtime rendering with blending of more than a million particles.
Cheers,
Mark