testing a particle system

[Bradster]

I have once again begun experimenting with a different facet of 3D design for Genesis. This time, I'm trying to create particle emitters that will simulate fire and smoke for the many explosions I'm sure will need to be made.So far, everything still looks way too bright and too uniform for my liking. The best way to create realistic turbulence is to add dozens of small particle attractors. That takes a lot of time arranging them properly and lots of CPU cycles to render; so, I'm trying to find some shortcuts first -- especially since the particle system *already* eats up a lot of CPU power. The 2.1 second animation here took a whole 42 minutes to render! Of course, this is on a three-year-old computer.....In this example, I used the same "flyby" file from my little camera tutorial and tacked the emitter onto the starboard engine. The effect I'm looking for here is that the engine has taken damage from enemy fire (perhaps like in Sequence 6 on the Genesis screenplay?) and is spewing out and burning up copious amounts of fuel.[img]http://brad.project-think.com/starfle....mg]Click the image for a very brief 200KB QuickTime video.

[Slacker]

Brad if you need any help rendering stuff I have 2 pretty fast machines here (an Athlon XP 1800+ and a Pentium 4 1.8) both of which stay on 24/7 which could be used.You'd have to show me what to do though as my 3d knowledge goes no further than making some maps for Quake 2.

[AndyThomas]

Ditto - I'm running something 6 months old at the moment. It might be interesting to test the same render on our different machines, Mac v PC...

[Bradster]

Hmm! Distributed computing. I like the sound of that. :biggrin:The problem here, Slacker, is that you would need to get copies of Cinema 4D XL 7 and PyroCluster on those computers of yours. I don't think there is any other software that will render for C4D. Similarly, Andy, you'd need a copy of PyroCluster to properly render these particle clouds.I do have good news, though. It seems that I was rendering the particles in that animation on a much higher detail setting than was necessary. I tweaked the controls and have found that I can cut the render time by more than half with very little visible loss in quality!Here is a snapshot using the original settings. Rendered in 80 seconds:And this uses some lower quality settings. Rendered in 33 seconds: Though, I could send Andy some regular C4D files to render. Yes, I think I will take you up on that offer when it finally comes time to do some extended, proofed renderings.Oh, and a correction -- this computer is just a tad over 2 years old. I'm using a Mac with dual 500 MHz G4s. I too would be curious about how my render times compare to a newer PC... I'll set up an animation file later today *just* for that comparison.(Edited by Bradster at 10:21 am on Aug. 26, 2002)

[Bradster]

Okay, Andy, I've got a sample animation file here for you to run just to see how our computers compare with basic rendering. All 241 frames at 320x240 took exactly 15 minutes to complete on my machine.Download here:http://brad.project-think.com/starfleet/xb.tgz (3.9 MB)Here's how the result should look:http://brad.project-think.com/starfleet ... output.mov (420 KB)