There is a hole between particle systems and the current genome modifiers.
I’d like to be able to use magma flow to be able to do things to whole groups of objects - stuff like scattering, feather/hair/grass systems, crowd systems etc.
I guess it adds another outer loop where you loop over a population count. You’d have to also output a transform as well as the verts.
This would open up a ton of possibilities.
You can kind of do a lot of this stuff with particles already, but the problem with particles, you don’t have much if any control over deformations in the particle meshes and certainly no access to anything like raycasting from individual particles.
You could use it to build procedural geometry as well - imagine something like using it to build wires on a suspension bridge or power lines, complete with pseudo simulated wind sway.
What’s the functional difference between that and running instanced modifiers?
The concern I would have with a compound object is that the objects would be unique before they are added to the compound object, but afterward would be one object, so you couldn’t make a collection of objects that had unique modifiers on them after the Genome part.
I have never tried TP. I guess I have been burned too many times by Cebas!
Well, I guess ignore this request then.
One thing that got me excited was the thought of the genome iteration loops. That would unlock a bunch of techniques such as relaxing a scattering of objects so that none are too close to each other. This would be much faster than dart throwing techniques for getting some nice realistic spacings.
Chad, one place where the instancing idea fails is when you want to do stuff based on other objects nearby.
I am half-joking.
Houdini, ICE and TP were designed to do those kinds of things. We are discussing internally how to make your wishes come true, but Genome The Geometry Modifier is probably not the key since it operates on vertices in object space. We are looking beyond that. Stay tuned…
That’s exactly what TP does…