I am having problems with soft selection.
I am using delete modifier based on a magma flow setting and I am trying to get soft selection.
Deletion and range seems to work and my particles falling outside of the sepcified distance are deleted, but I can’t get falloff to work.
Did I miss something?
it does not matter that the position is wired directly bypassing ToWorld node - object is at 0,0 and also same things happen if it is connected.
Additionally When I assign the last node before selection (055 Divide) to any channel and view it in partivcle data viewer I see proper values between 0 and 1. But when same node is wired to selection, the selection output is everywhere 1.
The flow looks ok.
You will need the ToWorld operator only if your particle system is not aligned to the Origin.
You don’t need the ToFloat operator since Distance is already a Float.
Otherwise it looks good and when I recreated it here using a Teapot turned to PRT Volume and a Box to select, it produced correct falloff with particles being deleted between 0 and 50 units from the surface. Particles farther than 50.0 units would be deleted with 100% probability.
You should make sure that your particle system does NOT have an invalid ID channel (e.g. a channel willed with 0 for each particle), because this will produce incorrect results.
Having NO ID channel is ok (the Index will be used instead), and having a real ID channel with the Born ID data would be perfect to avoid flickering between particle animation frames.
Use the Particle Data Viewer to check the content of the ID channel (if any). If the ID channel contains the same value for each particle, add another Output to the Magma modifier, set it to ID and feed in the Index InputChannel into it to fix it.
There was a constant 0 ID in source particle loader.
But when following your suggestion I add Index > ID mapping, I get the error message that selected Index is not avail in this PRT Object.
Any fixes?
Make sure you selected the correct Index channel.
The Index channel does not really exist in particles, it is generated internally by the Magma modifier to give you access to the order of iterating over the particle stream. So it always exists as Input.
No idea. I am a bit concerned about the IDs of your nodes. Why do you have nodes with ID 1000058?
Just to be sure your modifier isn’t in a bad state, drop another Magma before the Delete and only set Index->ID there. Do you get the same error?
Also, don’t cut off the rest of the UI when posting screenshots, it helps us when we see the actual error displayed at the bottom…
Finally, what build of Krakatoa is this? You can evaluate in the Listener
Also, sometimes I am having issues with some messags popping up saying something about problems with Undo. Can’t remember now exactly.
Then I need to restart Max and it works fine again. THat could be connected with strange IDs. Is there any kind of auto cleanup on a magma modifier to get the nodes recreated and IDs assigned numbers from 0?
OK. After downgrading to 2.0.2.46508 it seems to work fine.
So it looks like you’re having a bug in the latest beta build.
However, even though I added the mapping on top of PRT object and below soft selection and delete it does not solve my problem. I can’t get the selection be soft.
Also, in 2.0.2 the selection done that way based on a reference to animated geometry seem to suffer again. In latest beta it updated properly.
We broke something in 2.1.5.
My desktop machine was still on 2.1.3 and it worked. I installed 2.1.5 and it fails. We will have to fix that. In the mean time, try an older Beta build.
Regarding Undo messages - sounds like the MAXScript Garbage Collection error message. This is not ours, it is MAXScript doing something wrong. If it is something else, please make a screenshot.
Turns out the strange IDs can be caused by loading an older scene containing a BLOP in the latest versions of Krakatoa where BLOPs have changed under the hood to have explicit internal input and output sub-nodes. In theory, saving the flow as MagmaScript and reloading it (or using Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Del. and Ctrl+V to select All, copy, delete and paste again) might solve this, but I haven’t tried yet.
So which beta build would let me use inVolume or this kind of selection we’re discussing on an animated geometry and soft selection (see my edited message above).
Let me try 2.1.3.
I have mapped the output of my soft selection to both channels: Selection and Density just for debug purposes.
In particle data viewer I get proper values on Density (between 0 and 1) but selection for them is still 1. And after rendering there’s a sharp cut instead of a falloff.
See if there is anything on these lists that affects you - e.g. Thinking Particles 5.1 support or any of the other fixes.
Soft Selection should work in any version of Magma since 1.5…
Does the Particle Data Viewer show the Selection with Krakatoa Delete on? The Krakatoa Delete has a checkbox “Reset Selection Afterwards” that alters the channel on top of the modifier. This way any modifiers above the Delete would still affect all particles. You have to uncheck that checkbox or disable the Krakatoa Delete to see the right Magma data in PDV.
I added an Exponent value - when set to 1.0, it is linear falloff. Values below 1.0 will make it fall off faster. Values above 1.0 will make the edge harder. You could replace it with a Curve if you want fancier controls.
I disabled the Krakatoa Delete > Reset Selection Afterwards.
I used a viewport color to show the falloff in black to red.
Since I used a PRT Volume that has no ID channel, I did not have to create my own ID from Index, but I added it for clarity.
