bf-blender w/ particle stuff 03/05/2004

leon · Post by **leon** » Mon May 03, 2004 3:32 pm

hi all,

A little update to the bf-blender I posted recently: just improvements to deflection. Leaking should be almost (if not completely) gone, at least for stationary deflectors.

Calculation is a little slower, but the results are much better!

The binary is here:

http://reblended.com/www/leon/bf-blender.zip

And for those with other OS's (and who are feeling *really* adventurous!), there's a patch against bf-blender here:

http://reblended.com/www/leon/bfpatch.txt

The patch hasn't been tested as far as I know yet, so be careful!

Cheers

Leon

ada89 · Post by **ada89** » Mon May 03, 2004 9:38 pm

Just tested it...and..YAY no more leakage!!!

...but when i set surface damping to 1, the leakage does happen but if i set it to 0.999, no leakage. I hope you can fix it

leon · Post by **leon** » Tue May 04, 2004 5:11 am

hi ada89,

Thanks, noted and fixed! I'll update later today probably!

Cheers

Leon

kencanvey · Post by **kencanvey** » Tue May 04, 2004 1:09 pm

Thanks Leon,

can't wait until this is part of Blender proper

Ken

lucky3 · Post by **lucky3** » Tue May 04, 2004 6:07 pm

great improvements!! there's no leakage now!

[edit]: I've just a little feature request: have the ability to set an object "Destructor" (like "Deflection" for example) who could destroy the particles when they touch the Destructor Object.
What do you think about this? Is it possible?

leon · Post by **leon** » Thu May 06, 2004 3:28 pm

lucky3: that's an interesting thought. I'll have a think about it and let you know...

Rhysy · Post by **Rhysy** » Thu May 06, 2004 8:50 pm

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but I can't get the new effects to work. I've set a plane to deflect particles and permeability is 0, but particles just go straight through. Anything else I have to do ?
I put the binary in my 2.33 directory, I'm running Windows XP.

leon · Post by **leon** » Fri May 07, 2004 1:40 am

Hi Rhysy,

Some things to check:

1) Make sure the plane normal is pointing towards the particles
2) Make sure you have clicked "recalc all" on the emitter after making the plane a deflector
3) For nice results, the "keys" value should be increased from it's default of 8 to 50 or 100, depending on the particle life.

If these don't work (or they're too obvious and you've tried already!), could you post the .blend on website somewhere, and I'll take a look?

Cheers

Leon

Rhysy · Post by **Rhysy** » Fri May 07, 2004 5:02 pm

Thanks, that solved it !
Now if I can only find a use for this....

Koba · Post by **Koba** » Sun May 09, 2004 1:49 pm

Hi

How about this for a use of the new particle deflection: Fluid dynamics! I feel this would be a great goal for blender. Just duplivert metaballs to the particles and now you can have real fountains with realistic flowing water! The water could spray up, fall down under gravity and collect realistically in the bowl of the fountain. With raytracing the effect would be superb! I have tried it but currently this works but is slow (due to the massive mesh resolution after metaball conversion) and unrealistic as there is nothing to simulate surface tension.

If the metaball code was adjusted to make lower resolution meshes with larger volumes of influence and/or the particles could be made to repel each other/keep their distance, blender would be able to do real nice water effects like the Realflow plugin for all those "high-end" 3D apps. The possibilities would be endless. It would be more usable if Blender could import a series of sequential meshes (converted metaballs) for each frame so the metaballs would only have to be converted and calculated once and not every time the frame changes. Maybe I could write a python script to do this if there isn't one already.

This is an advanced feature that I feel could be implemented relatively easily as Blender already has all the right elements (particles deflection, dupliverts and metaballs). I feel it would be an impressive feature that would make blender even more formidable. Don't let these ideas distract the coders from their current goals but it seems to me it is all there just waiting to be put together!

Well done leon for this great new feature!

Koba.

ideasman · Post by **ideasman** » Sun May 09, 2004 2:08 pm

As well a duplivert metaballs you could apply a procedural displacement map on the metaballs so the actual mesh shape changes to be more like water (waves etc)

Koba · Post by **Koba** » Sun May 09, 2004 2:15 pm

Wow. Didn't think of that.

Never tried applying procedular displacement maps to metaballs. Does this work? Or do you mean applying a displacement map after the conversion to polys? Thats a good idea to give small scale variations to drops, for example.

Koba.

Monkeyboi · Post by **Monkeyboi** » Sun May 09, 2004 6:54 pm

I'm afraid I don't think displacement mapping works with metas. Just tried, and they go all black

lucky3 · Post by **lucky3** » Sun May 09, 2004 7:51 pm

Monkeyboi wrote:I'm afraid I don't think displacement mapping works with metas. Just tried, and they go all black

displacement mapping works with metaballs, nurb and mesh. take a look at the 2.32 release notes and this pic :
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/uploads/pics/Displace5.png

[edit]
oops i've just tried it and you're right, the render is black, except with the Zinvert enabled. In fact, the Zbuffer is wrong, inverted.
[/edit]

ada89 · Post by **ada89** » Sun May 09, 2004 9:14 pm

Just tested it and it does works but the weird thing was that I had to place the lamp behind metaball to shine in front of it.……bug?