First off, so far Stoke 2.0 is working really well and I find it awesome! I do have some thoughts/questions/findings:
When using a Particle source in Stoke 2.0, in my case a PRT Loader inside a Field Magma, and using a Field Force it seems to only use the visible particles from the PRT Loader rather than the renderable particles. This isn’t wanted behavior is it? I would like to be able to see a percent of my individual PRT contributors rather than have to see all the particles I want included in the Field Magma.
At the moment, if you hit “exposed” on any parameter, Field Magma crashes (I expected this but wanted to report it any way). It would still be nice to have exposed parameters in Field Magma once you fix this.
It would be nice if Field Force had a multiplier so you could quickly adjust the strength of the Spacewarp without having to go into your Magma flow. This isn’t a big deal but it’s one of those “would be nice” things.
This is logged internally as a known limitation of Stoke. Right now, we simulate in the viewports, so we don’t have the luxury of switching Max to render state. We could (similar to how XMesh switches Max to render state for caching), but it might have side effects while you are working on asynchronously. So even in Stoke 1.0, all you get is viewport particles.
We will look into this.
This is unexpected. It does not crash for me here.
What exactly is the crash? Any error messages, MAXScript Error logs etc.?
I did find a small bug where clicking “e” to expose the Enabled state does not expose unless some Input is already exposed. I just fixed it internally. But I get no crashes.
This is logged internally as a known limitation of Stoke. Right now, we simulate in the viewports, so we don’t have the luxury of switching Max to render state. We could (similar to how XMesh switches Max to render state for caching), but it might have side effects while you are working on asynchronously. So even in Stoke 1.0, all you get is viewport particles.<<
isnt this expected? i mean you want a subset for speed for a reason, and if you operated on all the particles, wouldnt that break? i suppose you could have options
It wasn’t exactly expected. We realized it was happening when we were about to release Stoke MX 1.0.
So we logged it as a problem, but did not want to make last minute changes. We will explore it again for 2.0.
Basically Stoke 1.0 is WYSIWYG in the viewports - it simulates exactly with what you see. PRT Loaders, PFlow systems etc. providing velocities or seeding for new particles are NOT switched to render state. We are not talking about the particles simulated by Stoke, but about the inputs of Stoke that drive the simulation. Stoke produces exactly the particle counts you want, with the ability to show a percentage of them in the viewports. That is cool. The problem is the control systems that drive the simulation, and we should look into that again…
Forgot to hit subscribe so missed the replies, sorry.
The problem with only using Viewport particles, and the reason it’s causing me issues now and not in Stoke 2.0, is when I use Field Magma it clutters up the viewport when I do my Stoke sim. I could hide Field Magma, which works but then I don’t get to see my updates to the velocity field (and in it I have a viewport toggle, but of course that makes Stoke not take it into account anymore). There have been instances where I did want to use 10,000,000 particles as a velocity source from a PRT Loader (and used trackview to set the spacing of Stoke lower than 0.1cm) which worked and gave me the precise results I was looking for but in that case I hid the PRT Loader.
As for “exposed” on a parameter in Field Magma, I tried it again and now it doesn’t crash… I’ll see if I run into it again and will post what the error was that came up. I almost wrote down the error when it happened but at the time I didn’t think it was implemented into Field Magma yet…