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Rendering Thinking Particles

Introduction

Krakatoa provides somewhat limited support for Thinking Particles (at least compared to the Particle Flow support). On the one hand, Thinking Particles has been heavily optimized to deal with meshes and relies on the particle geometry for storing data like mapping coordinates and materials, making it difficult to impossible for Krakatoa to abstract the data into point-sized entities with data channels. On the other hand, Thinking Particles is not the primary particle system in 3ds Max or at Prime Focus and has thus received less attention in the development process.

Nevertheless, Krakatoa can acquire and render particle data from Thinking Particles systems and provides support for custom data channels which can be used to work around some of the above mentioned limitations.

Thinking Particles (TP) Overview

  • Thinking Particles is a Rule-Based Particle System.
  • Other than Particle Flow which is an Event-Based system where particles move from one container to another based on Test results, TP uses low-level operators that can create and modify particle data in particle channels continuously, similar to the Particle Flow Tools Box #3 DataOperators.
  • TP can also move particles between containers, but the user interface does not represent the flow of particles between containers like in Event-Driven systems but rather concentrates on the building of Dynamic Sets that provide the rules for particle behavior.

Supported Data Channels

  • Krakatoa supports the following native Thinking Particle channels:
    • Position
    • Velocity
    • User Channels named the same as supported Krakatoa Channels (e.g. Position, Velocity, Normal, Density, Color, Emission, Absorption etc.) and using the same type as in Krakatoa will be automatically acquired.
    • User Channels with arbitrary names can be acquired and saved if a User-Defined Channel with the same name and type exists in the Krakatoa Channels To Save list.

Particle Color Sources

  • By default, the Group's Color will be used to populate the Color Channel of the particles.
  • If a User Channel with type of Color or Point3 and the name "Color" is defined, its per-particle values will be used as the Color Channel by Krakatoa.
  • Materials assigned to particle shapes in TP will NOT be considered in any way.
  • Global Channel Override KCMs in Krakatoa will be applied to all scene particles including Thinking Particles. If the KCM is setting the Color channel, it will override any incoming color info from the above sources.
  • The Color Global Shading Channel Override also applies to all scene particles including Thinking Particles, overriding any previous values in the Color channel.

SEE ALSO