Wish: PRT Plane Gizmo

Just a workflow thought.

A movable PRT gizmo would be nice that shows the slice of the percentage of particles in the viewport. As is when the Viewport->% of Render is set to the default of 1% the PRT only show particles of the leftmost region. A view slice type gizmo (ie a plane or something similar much like the e-poly slice gizmo) would be nice to move across the region to examine the internal densities of the PRT. If the percentage is say 10%, you would get 5% on the left and 5% on the right side of the gizmo.

It is already implemented, for instance when you use a box as a particle cull object, except you that you don’t need to make a box, alter the properties to display as bbox, untick renderable, add it as a culling object, deselect the PRT, select the box, move the box, ect. ect.

EDIT: I did see the information on the 3ds max deformation gizmos and how they may not scale properly with a PRT since the bbox may alter during the course the playback. So this maybe a moot wish.

The trouble with this is that we don’t know what the order of particles might be. If you save a GeoVolume, particles in PRT file will be ordered bottom to top. If you save a PFlow, the creation order will determine the PRT order. If you fill a Surface or Volume via Position Object in PFlow, the order will be totally random. So a gizmo would not be able to show anything.

There is a Manipulator for PRT Loaders already which gives you a slider that can be moved to show particles in Render/Viewport. Just enable Manipulate mode and select a PRT Loader. That’s how far we can go.

Understood, thanks for the explanation. Box cull it is :slight_smile: