The latest addition the the Particle Tools includes an option to pipe the output of the ParticleMuxer into a new particle shape giving artists the possibility to create astonishing effects with lots of particles that can be rendered by the GPU. The video below uses an emitter creating point particles that are influenced by a gravity field and an image based displacement node coming with the Particle Tools.
The second support node for the free Particle Tools inside the t01.mufpi project is now officially out. The so called “imageBasedDisplacement” does what you probably already assume by its name, it offsets particles based on texture information. The video below is a quick test of an emitter spitting out particles that are influenced by an animated, rotating checker texture.
I know that some of you folks are really anxious to play with the new particle nodes and I hope to release them very soon. For the time being I just wanted to release a little video that came into being while testing the interaction between emitted particles and the rayIntersect node.
In conjunction with some other stuff I was planning to do regarding particles and the instancer in Maya there was an interesting thread coming up on percutio.com [german] which discussed the possibility to create some sort of pinscreen object in Maya. Although that didn’t seem to be too hard of a problem at first it was a really tedious process to come up with a solution that doesn’t involve a lot of manual setup. Scripting had certainly to be done but this alone proved to be too slow and most of all the animation problem and maybe a real-time feedback during setup where lacking. So I took some hours to create the first ones of some nodes that deliver an easy possibility of manipulating the particle data stream going to the instancer. The first results are shown in the little video below.
