Semi OT: birth massive amounts of parts on high res mesh?

Krakatoa for 3ds Max
1

Heya Folks,

The usual nonsense with this one - foam on a very dense water mesh. I’ve got access to krakatoa, pflow (ick) and thinking particles. Seeing as the lovely folks of thinkbox have made massive speed ups in mesh interaction with the krakatoa collision operator and also done some foam setups during the frantic film days I was wondering what engine you guys found was the quickest when dealing with really high particle counts based on data from a really high res water mesh? I’m using the latest houdini ocean toolkit for “dumb” shots which looks great and it’ll give me crest data using it’s in built vertex colours so I’d like to emit based on this, apply some kind of noise or turbulence and then use krakatoa’s intersectRay to project back on to the mesh (Cheers hristo!) so I can make foam / wakes and so on. Ideally I’ll be using some pretty high res meshes (or baking out an animated map from the high res crest data and using it as an emission map) to get as much connection driven by the crisp detail of the mesh.

What do you reckon the fastest processor for generating huge counts?

Much appreciated!

John

2

I haven’t done any benchmarks, but all your options should be reasonably fast. Both Krakatoa (PRT Surface or PRT Maker+Magma), PFlow and TP should be quite fast when dealing with SURFACES (PFlow can be very slow with Volumes, but distributing particles to faces is relatively simple). It can get slower if you have to evaluate the Vertex Color via a VertexColor Map to define where the particles go. But it should be fairly stragith-forward. I suspect PRT Surface would be generally faster than PFlow, but it does not have an option to distribute by Vertex Color or Vertex Selection, so you will have to delete particles using Magma and Krakatoa Delete, making the process more convoluted.

I would suggest trying PFlow or TP and benchmarking it. If it is too slow to bear, try the Krakatoa approach. Let me know if you need help.