Rotating & deforming collisions

Particle collisions now support rotating and deforming objects! This should give some nice new possibilities for particle dynamics :) More detailed info in the commit message.

Refactored fluid particles

I already wrote about this development in the code.blender.org blog, but now the refactoring is finally done! Check the video to get a quick start on the new functionality and the commit message for the details :) Now all we need is the particle surfacing from Raul and Stephen and we have some pretty nice fluid capabilities in Blender!

Particle textures reincarnated

This was way too long on the 2.5 todo-list, but effecting particle properties with textures is now once again possible! It's perhaps not the "effect anything with anything" solution I was thinking about at some point, but then again I'd rather not over complicate the current particle system with a complex system that can be far better handled with nodes in the future.

This was just committed so get a fresh test build after r34798 and your're all set!

New child particle options video

Here's the promised demo of the new child particle options for hair. I committed these goodies already a week ago, so just get a fresh build to play with these options!

Something old something new

There have been three bigger updates to particles stuff during the last couple of weeks. Mostly things are just like they have been in the past, but only better!

1. The point cache code has gone through some major changes internally and during the recode I added compression support for all disk caches. So now you can enjoy smaller file sizes in all simulations, not just smoke. I also wrote quite a lengthy post about everything point caches to the new code.blender.org blog, so check out that too (even if you're not so much into the technical stuff there are some ideas about future functionality in the end which you people might find interesting ;)

2. Hair children now have parting controls, a long hair mode and kink flatness. More about these in a demo video as soon as I have time to make one!

3. I finally merged Stephen Whitehorn's (chickencoop) viscoelastic sph particle springs patch to trunk, so there are some nice new options for fluid particles. I'll try to make a demo video about this too, so expect to hear from me again soon :)

Texture coordinates introduction video

Here's the promised video.

Particle texture coordinates

For a long time now Blender 2.5 particles have been crippled in the way that you couldn't animate particle material properties like color with particle age. In Blender 2.4x this was accomplished by creating an ipo-curve to a material property and then by some magic the frame range 0-100 was mapped to the particle life time. For me this always felt very unintuitive and hacky, so when the feature got naturally broken with the animation system update for 2.5 I didn't really feel like reimplementing the feature until a proper way of doing this was found.

To make a short story even shorter yesterday I found the way :) For quite some time textures that were applied to hair strands have had the "strand" coordinate option, which uses the point along a hair strand as the x-coordinate of the texture lookup. I simply upgraded this option to "Strand/Particle", so for normal particles this coordinate option now uses the particle age as the x-coordinate. Simple and extremely powerful! As an additional feature the y-coordinate is mapped to the location of a trail particle, so particle trails can be faded and colored nicely too!

I'll try to make a short introduction video to this functionality in the near future, but for now I hope you have fun playing with this! Some more technical information in the commit message.