Retaining arbitrary values assigned at birth.

Krakatoa for 3ds Max
1

Krakatoa rookie here. I am completely floored by the raw power your software offers. Awesome!

Anyway, I’m working on a project where I wish to have particles coming off an object, dragging the object’s UV coordinates with them.

I have a PFlow setup (see below) that uses a Krakatoa Geometry Lookup to grab UVs of an object. I tried using an Age test to execute the Geo Lookup if age < 1. If age is >= 1 the flow goes to a separate event that has an instance of all the operators from the original event sans the lookup. This resulted in the particles having good values on the first frame of their lives then returning 0,0,0 for the rest of its life.

Without the age test the particles keep getting the closest point on Geo’s UV then turning to what looks like noise when it’s further from the object than the search radius.

Is there a way to retain a value stored on the first frame of life? Is there an easier/more efficient way of achieving the desired effect?

Many thanks,
-derick

2

I would suggest using the Mapping Object operator if you have Max 2010 or higher (or 2009 with Extension).
It appears that the Geo Lookup is not preserving the map channel when the particle moves to another event, but the Mapping Object does that.
In fact, a Geo Lookup after the Mapping Object operator seems to work right, so I suspect there is something wrong with the way it initializes the channel.
We will consider this a bug and look closer (the Geo Lookup was written by our lead TD and was not part of the Krakatoa development process, so there are some things about it we don’t know completely without looking at the code :wink:) Also it does not have an option to affect particles just once per event (I suspect this makes the validity of the mapping channel not persistent between events, but I could be wrong).

3

Mapping Object operator works like a champ!

Thanks for your quick and thorough reply. I’m have a Maya particles background (so slow!) and was fearing the MAX/Krakatoa workflow, but have been able to hit the ground running thanks to the amazing documentation and your super educational posts on the forum.

-derick