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Software Discussion
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Maya
Sprites?
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cg4life 3 posts28 Oct 2005 -
28 Oct 2005
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28 Oct 2005
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28 Oct 2005
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cg4life 3 posts29 Oct 2005Thanks alot for the responses guys. I'm still pretty new to Maya and especially particle systems so I guess I'll need to find a step by step tutorial somewhere. My idea is that I have some text that is all black in a black environment, the snow will start to fall and reveal the text as it lands on it. I hope that describes it a little better, any more info would be greatly appreciated.
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16 Nov 2005Hey cg4life,
To set up sprites in a particle system here's what you do. You create the emitter you wish to use, select the particles. Go to the ParticleShape tab and scroll down to render attributes. You can change this from the default points to sprites. From there you can change the size of them and what not.
After you have their motion, size and dynamics all sorted you can then open the hypershade and add a shader to them as you would any other object. Once you have this all set up use the Maya Hardware renderer to render out the particles. It is especially built to render out particle systems.
Hope this helps a little bit.
Cheers,
~Todd. -
ant- 73 posts17 Nov 2005i just developed a standard snow particle system to do all the snow on adverts we are doing this christmas, unfortunitly i cant give any details, much of it was built onto secret proprietry software, what i can tell you is that i used geometry instances to spawn low poly (4 quads) flakes with textures that have transparecy, to outline the shape. emitting from a volume emmitter, the hard part is to symulate the way snow flutters down.
i would suggest instancers rather than sprites because you can have the flakes actually twisting and turning in the air, and they wont ever apear flat from any angle.
although hardware rendering is great, i found that software motion blur is too important, snow is soo softly blurred, and makes up much of its shape, not even the 32 stepped process used in the HRB isn't upto it -
cg4life 3 posts17 Nov 2005Thanks again for the responses guys. I also think that the snow fluttering part is going to be tedious. I was also thinking about a part in the sequence where the snow would freeze in mid-air and the camera would rotate around a specific flake, just an idea though. I'll try and get something ready to post soon. Thanks again.
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29 Nov 2005There are many useful particle scripts available at highend3d.com for download, Snow is a relatively easy effect to acheive, if you want to be able to see all the flakes closer to the camera, I don't know that I would try to build your snowflake out of geometry, unless you have a decent renderfarm or feel lucky today. I would get an image of your snowflake and put it on a 1x1 poly plane and texture map it with your flake (transparency and all,) because unless you are getting super close, you arent going to see much depth in the flake, then just select that poly and use it as an instance, to which you can apply all your turbulence, static friction and collision (for when it hits the text) and that sort of thing. Also, for some flutter, something that is quick and easy that works nice is a volume axis field, attached to a curve with an animation path. Then you get some of that extra random motion characteristic of snow being blown about a bit. Hope this was helpful in some way. Also, if youre looking for a good tut on instancing, try this one.
http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/info/maya/manu ... s.fm5.html
it's pretty much straight out of the maya dynamics book.
good luck to you man, and keep us posted.
-Z
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