So, as already posted a few days ago, I'm working on my Short Film and have
begun with implementing some of the effect-Includes that I'll need for
different scenes. For now, I'm trying to work myself chronologically through
the first part, for which I've needed the recent Tunnel... Anyways, to
properly flood the tunnel, I of course need particle effects to splash some
water through the tunnel...

I've had a look at Rune's Particle-System, but I'll be going to need
something far more flexible to fit the particle effects to my needs. My old
PartixGen-System was non I/O and didn't support object-interaction, and it
would've been tedious to implement objects into that.

So I've begun a new System! To have a flexible approach on frame-rates,
object sizes etc, the particles are simulated using Euler with
Adaption-Techniques. Every particle acts on its own and is indepenant of
other particles, and thus, I can freely choose the time-steps for each
particle. The System uses some base-values as reference, and additionally
checks the distance a particle moves from one timestep to the next. If
certain criteria aren't met, the timestep is reduced and the process
repeated until the particle has reached the current moment in time/the
actual frame.

I've had some hard time figuring a way to save/load particles elegantly and
supply enough methods for the User to define new effects. The System may
handle different Setups at once (e.g. fire, where particles don't react to
gravity, and water, where gravity is really needed) and I plan on
implementing some macros so that certain events, e.g. when a Glowing piece
of metal, generated by one Particle-System, hits an object, it will cause
sparks, stuff like that.

For now, the basic feature is up and running: Object-Interaction and
Adaptive-Timesteps. It's late now and I'll drop to bed, but just wanted to
share this. Enjoy!

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>
Email: tim.nikias (@) nolights.de

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'parsys_1st.mpg' (483 KB)