I’ve been running the demo version of Krakatoa to do the whole voxel cube trick, and had a couple of questions.
Would I be correct in saying that there is no way to create a single PRT volume for multiple objects, each object has to have its own PRT Volume?
And if you want objects to move through the volume then you have to add an Xform modifier?
If the above is correct, I just wondered what people would typically do on a physics sim with lots of objects - would they cache the objects into a single object using something like Supermesher?
I saw mention of Xmesh beta recently, would that be an important part of this workflow?
You can Edit Mesh/Poly attach or mesh cache a group into a single object, that is the only way I know.
What do mean by “move through”? As in move through and remove from the penetrating volume of the moving object?
In my experience you best of using a cached mesh, if anything you know you animation is locked and at the very least you will get better playback performance.
SuperMesher is great, XMesh IMHO is SM’s big brother.
By move through - I mean - if you move an object it doesn’t do anything to the PRT Volume, the object transforms are ignored, unless it has an XForm gizmo doing the moving.
I do like Supermesher, but the lack of a 2012 build, no reply to someone asking about back in August on their support forum, and no reply to my e-mail to Matt makes me worry a bit.
Maybe time to look at XMesh, depends on what the target price is going to be…
The ProBoolean Compound object added an Attach (No Intersections) mode a few releases ago.
It lets you animate the attached operands independently as sub-objects.
Since the ProBoolean object itself is not moving, if you PRT Volume the ProBoolean, you will get the mesh moving through the PRT Volume cloud.
XMesh and SM are of course another option if you have your objects already animated.
But if you want to work interactively with PRT Volume and multiple meshes behaving as one, the Attach mode of ProBoolean is the way to go…
This is pretty much the way I have done everything You must be careful when linking and unlinking hierarchies, I suggest you save before every action link/unlink. I don’t know who’s bug it is but for example in this scene if I unlink the Point helper I loose position keyframes in the Box.
Currently, the PRT Volume is evaluated in Object Space, so moving the source mesh OR the PRT Volume does not affect the level set voxels or the particle distribution.
Krakatoa MX 2 (Beta 4) will add a “World Space” option to the PRT Volume. Checking that and moving the source object around in world space will move it through the grid even if not using the ProBoolean Attach trick. We hope to post it before the weekend.
You must be careful when linking and unlinking hierarchies, I suggest you save before every action link/unlink. I don’t know who’s bug it is but for example in this scene if I unlink the Point helper I loose position keyframes in the Box.