I may have asked this before…
Is there a way to save out the sorted particles to a PRT file? Meaning, the first particle written out is the first (or last?) particle that renders?
- Chad
You can already fake it in Beta 5, so I assume it would be trivial to add a switch to do this as a feature.
Here is how to get it working in Beta 5:
*Create a Spotlight and align to the Camera.
*Enable Lighting
*Add the Lighting Channel to the list of Channels to save
*Save to File Sequence
Since the Lighting Channel saving loads all particles in memory, lights them and then saves the result without sorting to the camera, the particles will be written front to back relatively to the Light. But since the Light is aligned to the Camera, you will get the order you wanted anyway. If you want the opposite direction of sorting, just flip the light to point along the +Z of the camera…
NOTE: In the current build, there appears to be a bug in the channel accumulation. For example, I was loading a set of particles that had all typical channels.
The list of channels to save also contained them. But trying to save with Lighting channel added produced an error message that a channel already existed. It looks like the Memory List of channels has to contain the channels you want to save for this mode to work. So enabling Motion Blur (which adds the Velocity channel to the Memory List) fixed the saving of the Velocity channel, too. I have reported this already and it will be fixed for Beta 6. If you get this error, just make sure the channel you want to save is initialized in Memory by enabling the feature it requires it, e.g. Phong or Ward Shading to enable Normals etc.
Thank you.