Along with my wish for shadow density multiplier, I’d also like it if we could associate lights with particles for the purposes of includes, excludes, shadow casting, etc. Right now I want to have some particles casting shadows and others not, and also perhaps some setup where I could have a light only affect one particle system, which would not only afford control, but would speed up the shadow map creation process by only requiring some particles to be evaluated.
As for particles from disk… Well, yeah, that would be a bit more complex, unless Krakatoa were to create some helper objects in the scene to represent the particles coming in from disk. Actually, I’d like that anyway. Wishlist again.
Chad,
The current architecture of the renderer does not allow us to do this - it would require a large change in the way particles are collected and processed. Sounds like a 2.0 wish. We have a plan how to do it, but it wouldn’t be possible for 1.0.
At this point, all particles are collected first, without any info which particle system they came from. Then the whole bunch of particles is illuminated and does self-shadowing if the Use Lighting option is on and there are any lights in the scene.
The Shadow Casting option of the lights currently defines whether MATTE OBJECTS would cast shadows on the particles or not.
I think this is not the right way to do it and we are looking into implementing support for both Exlude/Include and Cast Shadows node-level property for MATTE OBJECTS so you can decide which objects and which lights will cast shadows on the particles.
But at this point, all particles are handled as a single cloud and all active lights will affect them as one entity regardless of the source they came from.
Still, keep the ideas coming, your comments are very helpful. You never know what might be implemented next ;o)
Cheers,
Borislav “Bobo” Petrov
Technical Director 3D VFX
Frantic Films Winnipeg