Particles!!!

stoofoo

Hello, friends!

Sir stoofles is looking for any information on the possibility of getting MAX(ver 7 or 8?) to display particles in the viewport. I do not mean the hoopdy little tick marks that show up when i scrub the animation.. I want to actually see my work in at least quasi realtime. rendering it is pretty unacceptable to me. Any info would be nice! Thanks in advance!

Soccerman18

What kind of particle generator are you using? There should be some sort of viewport display option where you can select mesh and change the percentage that you see in the viewport.

MoP

This is weird, because I just tried creating a Super Spray particle system, and regardless of what I choose, even instanced geometry, it'll only ever display the little + ticks, not actual geometry... even if I tell it to show that in the viewport. That's all it says I should do in the Help file, yet it doesn't seem to be having any effect... I'm wondering if there's some obscure setting somewhere I'm missing. Sounds the same as what's happening to stoofers here.

Eric Chadwick

Works fine for me. Are you using Mesh particles, set to Facing?

Soccerman18

Just tried it in Max 5, 6 and 8, all worked for me.

stoofoo

Perhaps you can make an image of your settings, cause it seriously has never changed from the tick marks for me. mop is correct. =/////

Eric Chadwick

Strange.

Here's a shot from Max 8 sp1, Direct3D display.

MoP

Arses. Missed the "Mesh" radio button. Knew I'd overlooked something silly like that. I'm guessing maybe Stoof did the same thing.
Thanks Eric!

stoofoo

gonna try this later, its possible i missed it, but i feel like no. THanks a million though in advance. I'm usually just stupid about these things.=)

Eric Chadwick

Yeah, been there done that too. Lemme know how it goeth.

Ryno

Watch out for that percentage spinner, too. It might look great in the viewport, but is only displaying 10% of the particles that will actually be rendered/exported. It'll look a lot more dense if you see all of them.

FatAssasin

Anything other than PFlow is soooo twentieth century.

Eric Chadwick

Do you know if anyone's supporting ParticleFlow for game export? We're looking into exporting particle systems from Max, as a quickie so we don't have to re-write a UI.

FatAssasin

I've never seen a game engine that didn't have it's own proprietary particle editor. It would be very cool though, and is something I've asked programmers about in the past. But I get the feeling that particle emplimentations are usually so engine specific that you can't really use the particles created in a general 3D app like Max or Maya. Plus the fact that there's no 3D file format that I know of that will save particle data on export. The only option I can think of off the top of my head would be to somehow use the particle cache you can save from Maya. But there's no cache to file option (other than saving it as part of the Max scene file) for Particle Flow.

Valandar

The Netimmerse / Gamebryo engine can read 3DS Max Superspray particles on export.

Slum

I wish there was just SOMETHING in the ways of a cross-platform, cross-engine, particle format.

We have model formats, texture formats, and audio formats. We have all kinds of behind-the-scenes licensed systems like Havok. But for particles, it's always engine-specific and there's no real solid way to translate particles from one system to another.

We can take a Quake 4 mesh, convert it to a common format, then export to Half Life format (all legality aside, it's simply an example), but we've got nothing (that I've ever heard of) in the ways of doing this with particles.

Eric Chadwick

Hmm, yeah good point. Collada is the closest format so far, but you'd have to use a custom <EXTRA> tag to store particle data, which kind of negates the whole idea of a universal format.

CrazyButcher

it's probably, because there is too much variation in the way particle systems work. take max's superspray and compare to particle flow, thinking particles..., completely different architectures. while a texture is always just some color values, or a mesh some vertices and index lists.

the other thing is that particles in apps like max,maya... arent really meant for realtime rendering, but mostly to create some cool fx for higher-res stuff, as rendering times arent so critical, you can do tons of more things.

however some sort of basics, like emitter type (point...) particle size, color gradient... should eventually work in most gameengines. then again if you just have the very basics in common, its not really worth saving a complex particle fx or ?
on the other hand you could always just ignore the stuff your engine doesnt support...