Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Texture coordinates introduction video

Here's the promised video.

16 comments:

  1. Thank you Jahka!!! Much appreciated!

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  2. is this already in blender 2.5??

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  3. Alex: yes, committed yesterday :)

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  4. Nice and simple, thanks!
    Two -maybe silly- questions, this works for halo materials, what if I emit geometry, is there a way to color it dinamically, the new mapping mode is already there... and what about billboards, you can replicate this by creating 2 extra UVs, couldn't this x / y strand projection system be used instead..?

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  5. grog: I thought about this too and I agree it would be very nice, but the current dupliobject system in Blender doesn't allow for the duplicates to be different from each other. So object visualization can use this, at least for now. What I didn't yet investigate is if billboards could indeed use these texture coordinates, so we'll have to see :) Thanks for the idea!

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  6. Very nice, but two (also maybe silly) questions:
    1] Does this really map to lifetime or end/start time? For example, one particle system with a halo black->white color gradient emitting from two different locations (possibly from two offset planes on the same object) in the same direction. Would you see two gradients, or one gradient. In other words, do these texture coordinates affect individual particle lifetime or global particle lifetime.

    2] Can this be used to affect more than just color... size for example:
    (I'm imagining a new texture influence section, "Particle: color,size,etc")
    I mean two different things:
    . size of the halo [material->halo->size]
    . size of emitted geometry [particles->physics->size] (you said dupliobjects don't allow differences.. does this include size)

    By-the-way, is it possible to animate individual particle size per individual particle age?

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  7. Very nice work! I'd love to see what affect you'd have on the nodal system for particles, and perhaps finally the nodal system for blender in general/modifiers.

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  8. @ grog: I second that!

    Jahka, again this is a great step forward, thank you!

    For more inspirational stuff, have a look at this blog, some works are simply amazing:
    http://www.trapcode.com/

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  9. odomok:
    1. Yes it really maps to the individual particle lifetime. So in your example there would be two gradients visible.

    2. This feature actually was in the code, but the ui showed wrong influence parameter names for halo material textures, so nobody knew it existed! However I fixed this just a few minutes ago. So yes you can effect the halo size, hardness and add value with textures too. Effecting actual particle properties with other particle properties is not yet possible, but this is on my todo list.

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  10. Long awaited feature in 2.5, thx a lot.

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  11. Amazing work that you are doing. Is is possible to animate a particle's size over its lifetime?

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  12. Thanks for the response! I just updated to the latest blender revision, and I'm enjoying animating particle material properties with age. One thing that would be useful though - if its simple enough and you have time - would to the ability to influence ring/line/star colors. (currently: black + white rings -> white + white rings)

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  13. Hi, Janne!
    I just wanted to try this cool feature for objects as particles... and I got that it's not working :) I thought - oh, it's broken, I need to report! ))
    Can you "connect" this to all other parameters (diffuse, emmit and etc.) for other types of materials so we could use it with objects. This will allow us to make really cool effects!

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  14. odomok: I'll have to check if this is possible. The whole halo code is quite ancient, so I don't know for sure, but it's a good idea none the less!

    Liquida: I agree it would be very cool, but unfortunately when you use objects as particles the objects are exact duplicates of each other, so there's currently no way to make them unique. There has been talk about adding some dupliobject randomization options at times, but nobody has started implementing anything yet.

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  15. Thanks anyway :) It's better than plain particles. I'll try some tricks with compositing and maybe will "colour" objects by particles.

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