Save animated PRT Volume object to prt sequence - is this possible?

[Jim_S]

Hi,

I’m wondering if it’s possible for my workflow to even work… I have a few pflows in my scene and I am using meshers to mesh the pflows, then I’m using prt volume objects to fill the meshers with particles, and then I’m trying to save out the animation to a prt file sequence.

Here’s my workflow: I have a geosphere animated along a spline that emits spheres to form the shape of the dendrite. I have poly copies of the splines that then have dendritic spines growing on them via pflow. The dendritic spines don’t get birthed until about frame 170, and I’m wondering if this is part of the issue since when I try to save out the animation to a prt sequence it fails at frame 170 and then won’t save beyond that frame unless I’m only saving a single frame at a time.

I would like to be able to save straight from pflow without using the meshers and prt volume objects but it seems that when I do this I only get particles from pflow that are at the pflow particle birth positions and not the full mesh shape that the mesher would provide. I need the shape information to be more defined since I intend to load the saved prt sequence back in and use it with Frost. If I saved straight from pflow with partitioning and random seed positions checked I would not get the accurate shape definition that I am after and that the meshers would provide.

I attached a few screen grabs. The purple spheres get birthed as the non-renderable geosphere is animated along the spline. At Frame 170 the dendritic spines grow along the spline. I have meshers for each plow and these each have an associated PRT Volume object.

In general are there issues with saving out animated PRT Volume objects that reference a pflow (that doesn’t start at frame 0) to a prt file sequence?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Bobo]

I am unaware of any limitations saving animated PRT Volumes from any meshes. Also, when you say that it fails on frame 170, you should also include a Log so we can see what the cause of the failure is.

Even better, if you can strip a simple scene that demonstrates the problem, you can email it to me so I can check it out and try to figure out what the problem is.

Of course, you could try a completely different approach:

• Create a PRT Source from the PFlow - this will turn each PFlow particle into a PRT particle.
• Add a Krakatoa PRTCloner modifier to the PRT Source - it does a spherical distribution by default!

Alternatively, you can create a single PRT Volume from a Geosphere shape, and pick the PRT Volume as the distribution object in the Krakatoa PRTCloner. This will also allow you to respect the Scale channel of the PFlow, in case your particles are changing size over time. This way, you have a single PRT Volume responsible for all the shapes. To make it look more unique, you could add a random Rotation in PFlow so each particle would be oriented differently… Note that the PRT Cloner shown only 10% of the particles it generates, set to 100% to see them all.

No Mesher involved!

Unless I am missing something…

[Jim_S]

Thanks Bobo, I was still having some issues with the workflow so I sent you an email with a scene file and a couple screen grabs.