One of the things I really like in Frost is the ability to mesh different sources together to a single smooth mesh. However usually when combining particles with geometry, the meshing type and settings you set to the particles won’t fit to the geometry. You need to do all kinds of tweaks to the geometry to make it work. If the radius size on your particles is pretty small you need to make sure the geometry has a whole lot more subdivisions in order to give the look which means slower calculations that could easily be avoided if you could just set a bigger radius to the geo source.
Would be best if you could see each source that’s inside the frost object on the sub-object level and set specific settings for each. Could be an option turned off by default (default use global settings). I guess this kind of functionality will also raise an issue with what kind of blending each sources has? For that there could be a rollout that’s active only if you use different meshing types and let you choose the type and blending distance between each sources.
Global weight between sources types would also be a nice addition. Basically an animated value that determine how much influence each source type has. Could make interesting effects.
We plan to solve this by allowing Frost-Specific modifiers (or KCMs) on Geometry objects to control the channels entering Frost. (Similar to how Krakatoa PRT Loader/PRT Volume etc. can have KCMs affecting Frost channels).
For example, you create a Teapot, add a Frost Channels Modifier to its stack and specify Radius of 5.0. Then you create a Sphere and add a modifier that sets its particle radii to 12.0. You pick both in Frost and you get different radii from the two different sources.
Or you add a KCM to the Sphere and set the Radius as a function of the Particle Index, or its Position, or its UVWs/Vertex Colors, or whatever and output to Radius channel. Frost evaluates the KCM over the particle stream created from the geometry vertices and Frost sees a unique radius per vertex. This way, adding a Vertex Paint modifier to the Sphere and paining some colors there could be copied by the KCM to the Radius channel, effectively painting the Radius! Or a Texture Map could control the particle channels without having to save the vertices to PRT and use a PRT Loader (which is how it is done right now).
