Hi, I'm trying to figure out how to emit particles every nth frame instead of creating 50 birth operators. Does anyone have an idea of how to script this? Thank you

so i'm trying the demo of box#3 on my 3ds max 2011 64bit and i can't make it work properly, my viewport is extremely slow and there are not even so many particles in the scene. It takes over 2 minutes to update the scene at any change, and if i increase the number of particles it can take over 2 hours to get nowhere. I'm using OpenGL, but there's no big difference with directx 9 or 10. I read on a forum that pflow is not desisgned to work on machines with AMD cpu and ATI gpu, is that true? No particles for me on this machine? these are my specs: CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 3.2 ghz GPU: Sapphire 5770 HD 1gb ram: 4 gbs ddr3 OS: win7 64 bit

Hi all I've been looking to see if this is a known bug and how to resolve it but can't find any info. I'm using particle paint helper to store vector points in a script operator and then using these co-ordinates to send particles to a find target operator downstream. This works fine. However, every time I close max and then reopen the file the placement paint operator has lost the particle Paint Helper. It has done this in 2 different projects, with different set ups I did to test the problem, so it seems a consistent problem. I want to use backburner to render this scene which isn't possible as the particle paint info is missing. Anyone else had this issue? A possible solution I would think is to somehow permanently store the vector info generated in the particle paint helper and then use that instead of the paint helper. I'm new to all this though and don't know how to script this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have a reference for a particle effect I need to duplicate.. I'm not sure if I need extra orbaz boxes or not. The effect has a particle stream that has particles traveling forward and backward along a spline/path, as if they are carrying information back and forth... There are larger foreground particles and smaller denser background particles.. Behind the particle stream is a wispy cloud-like layer, very ethereal .. My attempt to match it was maybe 50% there.. A particle sprite was provided, but I couldn't get the particles behavior correct.. I was using age tests and find target operators to have the particle stream around characters.. I was told the original particles were created in a propriety script/plugin for Maya.. I can post a video reference when I get home, i would really like to match this closely.

Hiya to all, Im fairly (but not completely) new to particles. I dont own the Orbaz plugins but have a budget for them should this project require. I need to do a stylized 'impact wave' traveling the length of a car. Not a car wreck, more of a transition technique to change the car options (paint color etc). Im thinking of a cubic wave form that travels the surface of the metal. Kind of a Mexican wave of cubes. Any ideas?

is there a simple/ known way to manipulate directly the position instead of speed of particles? want to use as most as possible of pflow box 1 inbuilt features. scripting would be okay. but should not cut the flexibility of standard operators. what i want is to controll particles by audio float controller (indirectly over an animated parameter of an object: e.g. the height of a box). if audio input is zero the particles should be in start position. if audio level is at 100 % particles should be at target position. and all other audio values should set the particles to corresponding positions between start and target position.

Hi everyone, so basically i got this really simple project that just cant seem to finish due to lot of technical problems due i think to PF and probably my lack of understanding of it i guess. I got many water jets coming out of the ground. There is 9 events wich gives birth in the source. All instanced stuff except the position and speed by surface so the particles emmit from different emmiters. (hope its clear :P ) 20 000 particles (wich is not enough for the effect but its too long to update at render time!!!! :( ) for each birth, then when they collide they spawn like 3 childs for 75% of them. There's also a keep apart in there and a speed by surface. Hmm so i mesh them with Vray bercon metaballs at render time. But when i send the job to backburner after 30 frames or so it hang and it wont render anymore. Have to cancel everything restart everything then throw it again for 5 frames..then again.. Its such a simple scene dont understand why its so hard to get the job done, so if someone can give me some hints maybe it'll be great dont know what to do anymore. Also if you know how to get a velocity pass from the bercon metaballs that would be great cuz i tried everything but with no luck... Thx a lot. Jay.

Hi and hello, I'm what you would call an allaround user of pflow, so I know the basics but not scripting. What I want to do is birth new particles within the volume of and older particle or the surface on it. Is it possible?

Hello all, I'm new here, and I would lke to know how can i achieve the effect of a pack of balloons flying in the air yet interacting with each other, like the Up movie ? Can anyone help me plz

hi particle lovers! i am starting to work alot more with fume, and advecting the voxel grids in pflow, is there anything you can share about your process? i know fume birth grid has alot of control, but this only relates the birth, often using a position object i feel yields more natural birth results but more important the fumefollow, i get some great results with it, but its not identical to the smoke sim, and also, how to correctly "kill" particles that have long dissolved in the smoke sim, whats the "right" workflow here any tips and feedback appreciated thanks ian

will pflow box 2 & 3 work in max 2012?

Hi guys, long time no see. I was working on a project with some position/vector/find target setup. Pretty simple and works great..until i assign a shape instance to a custom mesh - it doesn't render correctly. It's like some particles don't exist. If i use a standard shape operator or even something like an shape instance->Teapot it renderes correctly. Any ideas? Is there a face limit I'm running into?

Hi i want to create a birth group with chunks from a prefractured object and then send out to a new event using a deflector, the problem is they all get send out at once when the deflector passes the pivot of the original unfractured object, although i did center the pivots to each indivual chunk before adding to the birth group i guess this is more a max issue, when i do "Reset Pivot" the pivot resets back to the original pivot of the unfractured object for all the chunks, maybe someone of you knows a script how to completly delete the original pivot so that pflow looks at the current one ? or maybe another workaround ?

I have to model the individual jets, which I'll have to export as a mesh and then vraymesh. Compose them to form various compositions, as in the fountains which I have attached the zip file. Which technique i can get a good time to realize the water jets, and a decent fluid realism? (I would also create some splashes on the water surface).

Hi all, I'm working on a way to animate Cell Mitosis using pflow. So far I have looked at Pete Drapers Tutorial (can be found here: http://www.computerarts.co.uk/about_us/latest_issue/stop_press if your looking for it.) It is very good but is just not what I'm trying to do. I have animated a sphere that splits in two and with Pete Drapers pflow I can get it to spawn in different ways but it is not effect am looking for, it is too random. This is effect I want: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrMo...feature=related and hopefully lead to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m73i1Zk8EA0 I want a particle to spawn into 2 particles and then from the nucleus of both particles I want to spawn 2 more again and again and again and so on. I have tried a couple of ways but am just getting a bit confused and bewildered. If anybody has any suggestions please help my poor brain. Thanks Les

Hi I have a single particle (Particle1) moving through another PFlow system picking up the smaller particles with Collision and Lock/Bond. Then I have a final separate particle (Particle2) bump into Particle1 and ideally carry it plus all the Lock/Bonded small particles along, again using Collision and Lock/Bond. But I can only get Particle1 to Lock/Bond with the final particle - the smaller particles Lock/Bonded to the Particle1 don't follow Particle2's movement. Is it possible to have the smaller particles remaining sticking to Particle1 after it is hit by Particle2? I've tried playing round with Groups with no success. Thanks Mark

Hi, Is there a quick way to remove the PFlow Collision shape (WSM) from multiple objects? I've tried collapsing the modifer stack but the WSM doesn't get removed. The only way i can get rid of it is to delete it manualy from the list but i dont want to do that with a few hundred objects that have this modifier on it.... Thanks Phil

i created a scene where particles form a cylinder....i animated the scale factor in scale operator and set the Sync By option to Particle Age.... problem is that it works correctly if its set to animate from 100 to 0.....if i rearrange the keys or change the animation from 0 to 100 there are no particles at all.... whats wrong??

I have a similar problem like the previous guy. I also like to target objects. But actually my problem is: how to set for e.g. 2000 particles exclusively one one single emitter but this for every emitter when the emitters will be activated (collision test of proxy particles) over time (no distributed particles caused by setting all emitter meshes at once as emitters in the [b]Position Object[/b] Operator!!!)? In my case in the end I will have to manage thousands of find target operations - so I need a flow based on particle age of my proxy particles. I want to populate my thousands of emitters over time and also only for a specific duration (in the best case for only one frame). So my precise question would be: is it possible to script the emitter objects in the [b]Position Object[/b] operator over time? Let's say $Box01 should be the emitter at frame 0, $Box02 at frame 20, $Box03 at frame 40 and so on. I tried this within a [b]Script Operator[/b] after [b]Position Object[/b] operator, but it updates only when clicking on the [b]Position Object[/b] operator in [b]Particle View[/b].

Hi all, I have a system set up where my particles target 5 Geo objects using FindTarget. But I need them to target the objects in a SPECIFIC ORDER, I'm assuming I need to use a script or script integer but am no way a worthy script'r.. I'm looking for either a script ':shock:' or is there a way to achieve this using Events?? Thanks all!! William Wallace

how do I setup a find target operator for ease out of particle movement (if particles has currently no speed and spin) and ease in to the surface of a target mesh. when using "control by speed" in the find target operator there is an option for ease in. I understand this as an ease in for the docking part of the movement. But where can I say "ease out" for the starting part of the movement? Actually I'm dissatisfied with my particle motion because it is'nt soft.

hello...can someone help me with this... can i make my particles shiver in any way...i mean i have a box emitting particles to form cylinder....but when the particles are about to finish the process i want to create some sort of shivering effects.....like some particles in the bottom or top or the whole particles shivering.....can i achieve it....do i have to do some kind of scripting...if its about scripting can someone share it...i have no experience in scripting.....i don't even know the script basics....

Hello, I have stuck in particle rotation. Simple animation that find target and lock n bond at the target which is animated. I have problem to set rotation of particle as i did mannually. Please solve my problem. Thanking you Alpa

i just saw a post from Allan....honestly am surprised to see him here....coz i've seen his Legendary tuts from his site...really good ones...i jus finished seeing his Scripting GUI tutorial and made one....not something amazing but a simple box creator with adjustable length, width, segments etc....so i thought i'll share it with you guys...this is the very first time am getting my hands on scripting....please check it out... iam also trying to create an overall geometry creator separated by Buttons labeling Box Creator, Sphere Creator etc which i want to pop when clicking it....so can someone help me how to achieve it....

please someone tell me how he did this... [url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz-7Di2s4yY[/url] please share...

can we control Super Spray via Particle Emission window...what i want is, i created a line and wanted Super Spray to follow it...i was able to make the Super Spray to follow the line but now i wanted to control it through Particle Emission window because i wanted the particles to explode and freeze (thanks to orbaz freebie plugin)..... so can someone tell me how to control Super Spray through the Emission Window....please help me... i tried to make the PFSource to follow a line but i was not able to do it......if anyone knows how to make PFSource follow a spline that would be helpful....

Please look at the attached file (2010). The particles are distributed throughout Sphere001 using a Falloff map with an adjusted Mix Curve. The number drops off towards the edge of the sphere. It's working fine. Now, in PFlow delete Sphere001 and choose Sphere002 as the position object. The mesh and the material are the same, but the particles aren't distributed properly. They fill the sphere evenly. It looks like this setup only works if the position object is at the origin. I've tried using a 3D gradient map also, but get the same results. Is this a shortcoming in particle flow? Any way I can get round it? Thanks Mark

Hi I'm trying to create particles at the apex of a sphere and have them move down over it remaining tangential to the surface normals. I've attached my effort so far. Everything looks ok except the particles aren't facing tangentially. Is there a simple way I can solve this? Thanks Mark

Hi Oleg, Is there a limit to the particles face count when using a Group of objects with the Shape Instance operator and the Groups Members parameter? And even when using Particle Per Mesh option in the Render op?

i have some hydraulic hoses that i am animating directional arrows through to show flow. i am currently using a script operator [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=TsQ4HdA][img]http://s2.postimage.org/Q4HdA.jpg[/img][/url] that originated from this discussion. http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=6691416#post6691416 this is working though as i require 10+ PF my machine seems to have ground to a halt. Does Orbaz tool box's have alternative method for PF along animated spline? Maybe my method is ineffecient. I need flows going both opposite ways along a spline at different times. I am having difficulty using 1 spline for both directions, i will try to duplicate the spline.

Hi there, Here's the thing: I have Pflow setup so that it generates about 3000 planes with pictures of people on them. They need to fly in space and form a word (not important). The problem is I have only 50 pics, and the repetition is obvious. I thought that it'd be great if I had an operator that would give some random HSV values to each particle when it gets born, but can't find anything like it... Anyone got any ideas or scripts in mind? Thanks a lot!!! Liron

Join me on facebook for ky_trail group http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=139488169399337&ref=ts There is samples of R&D there for ky_trail plugin

I'm having difficulty with my particles and lock/bond test. I'm animating a flock of particles with their own animation and find target plus lock/bind to land on an object. Once the particles settle or bond to the object target the individual animation within each particles stops. I want it to continue. The particle settings are [Shape instance / random offset /Absolute Time]. The shape is animated. Any ideas? Also, can you lock/bond to a volume rather than surface like position object settings? Sorry no screen grabs the project is offsite.

I just wanna to say thanks. As I've to learn maya for my new job, PF is so better than maya's particles. Thanks for your amazing job Oleg ;)

As i am working on an effect in which i want particles to randomly emit, like it should emit in random intervals and not continuously, as auto key or set is neither working for the particle emission so i want to know is there any solution for this problem ?

I am trying to get particles to emit from an object, be controlled by a 'find target' icon, and then form on an animated shape (in this case a bird), and then fly off from the bird to swirl around before exiting. Everything is working good, except that when the particles enter the event that forms the bird, they disappear then suddenly reappear on the animated bird shape. When they 'age test' off the bird shape to the next 'find target', it works perfectly. I referenced Allan McKay's script to have particles find target geometry, but it didn't work with animated shape... Thanks a billion in advance for any help. I have attached the file for reference. -g

Hi I'm coming back to particle flow after a hefty break. I have a BirthScript that's creating about 15000 particles 'if t < 0'. The particles remain static throughout the animation. Is the only way I can get smooth viewport playback still with a Cache operator and the memory hit that creates? Or maybe to script simple meshes at the positions and turn off the PFlow system? Or is there something in the boxes that could give me immediate smooth playback? All I need is a simple dot display of the positions. Thanks Mark

[b]Hi everyone.[/b] I´m trying to do a fairly simple animation, but without success: Particles driven by SpeedByIcon shall run through kind of bottleneck: [img]http://deepartmend.dyndns.tv/exchange/particles_through_bottleneck/particles_through_bottleneck.jpg[/img] I´m playing around with displace-SpaceWarp and VectorFields, but I cannot achieve a good result. How would you do such kind of animation? Do you have any tips for me? Here´s the Max-file shown above (Max 2009): [url=http://deepartmend.dyndns.tv/exchange/particles_through_bottleneck/particles_through_bottleneck.max]particles_through_bottleneck.max[/url] Thank you and kind regards. [b]Sascha[/b]

When I add the collision in PFlow. My CPU always use 25~30% only. How to use 100% in Multi-core CPU?

I want to stop all particles at centain moment, just like a waterfall being suddenly frozen. How can I do this with Box 2? Thank you.

Hi Guys, Does anyone know if multimatteelement works with pflow? Cant seem to get it to render. thanks, Nick http://www.screencast.com/users/Nick_S/folders/Jing/media/b87b4e31-26c1-4f87-82dd-4efce834688a

I have a collision test with a uomniflect and everytime I try to disable the collision test, max just crash. I have max 2010 64 on windows 7.

Hello, could someone help me fix this script? I think it's pretty handy... it's supposed to help you dynamically create any mesh shape and assign it to any particle. In this way it's easy to render complex shapes in a particle system, even if the required shapes have different materials. The idea is very basic: for each particle it creates a snapshot of a template mesh and then applies a TM to the created mesh to match the TM of the particle. To keep track of the particles that have already a mesh assigned Im using a global array. PROBLEMS: - (major) it simulated fine in the viewport and when rendered as a single frame but it doesnt render correctly when rendered as a sequence (in the render you only see one mesh, while in the viewport you see the simulation correctly) - sometimes the reset/cleaning functions don't work properly and have to manually delete the instances created. SCENE FILE (3DS Max 2010): [url]http://www.mattjakob.com/DynamicMultiplier.zip[/url] Thanks ________ [URL=http://herbalvaporizers.info]HERBAL VAPORIZER[/URL]

Hello, I have take a sphere and pf-shaped cylinder. I try that cylinder some time move rendomly on surface. Then gratually slow down and get stright rotation. Its happen but rotation(speed space,y=90) take place in one frame. I am trying that rotation take place gradually but cant success. How can i do that ? Please help. Thanx.

Hi, I'm on max 2010 (no boxes) I wonder what's the difference between the particle flow Initial State Operator and Initial State Helper?

Hello, Here I have attech video. I want this type of interparticle collision. This is i made manually. How can i do this? Please give me some hint. Please download the video from following link https://www.yousendit.com/download/S1VCcHBKTlFwaFRIRGc9PQ Thanx

Is there a way to get more than 5 million polygons out of a single PF Source? I've got a sample file that shows what happens when the particle system tries to have more than 5 million polygons at a time. The Display operator works fine, but anything trying to get the mesh (Mesher, Snapshot, etc) can only get a portion of the mesh. - Chad

Hello. Im not entirely sure this is something regarding PFT3 but I cant set the Shape node to Vertex... I think I used to do that before but now I have two sets of shapes and none containing the vertex option. Is there another way of creating a particle flow emitting vertices (Im not talking about display but actual geometry/shape) Thanks ________ [URL=http://screplays.com/]STARCRAFT REPLAYS[/URL]

Hello, Happy New Year to All ! I have made Pf-01 where particle emits from icon, get plane as a find target and lock to plane. I take another pf-02.These particles will emits from icon and lock on pf-01 paricles.I want to take pf-01 particles as find target. pls find one zip file attached. Is it possible ? How can i made this ? Please help Thanx

Hello, In view port,which flow of particle is OK. When i render file on net then flow gets distrurbed. What should i do ? I use stereography. In Both (left and right) camera paricles looks some different. Why this happend. Please help.

Hello I´m making a crowd simulation and have one problem: [b]The particles are spinning around from "Keep Apart" in place of keep their faces to forward.[/b] [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=gxIrJ6J][img]http://s1.postimage.org/IrJ6J.jpg[/img][/url] For moving particles, I use "Find Target", where these particles have shapes of the animated mesh objects. For keeping their faces forward, I have "Rotation" operator with "Speed Space Follow" instead of it - and all goes just fine, but when they have to pass through the door of a building, they start accumulate and while they´re waiting for their turn to pass, all of them are spinning around. For keeping them apart there is "Keep Apart" operator too in the scene which makes them turn and go back when facing each other. I can´t change the value of "Rotation" to any other modes, because all of particles are going from the different points to the door, and they must change their directions very often. How can I fix this? If it is posible to make them any restrictions for no allow to turning back or somthing like this? Will be excelent, if there will be any way to make them stop, wait for their turn, then go forward a little bit, then wait again and so on... How people make it when exiting from the building. I work in 3d max 2010, without any plugin or additional program. Thank You

hey guys, need a hand with Pete's tutorial in Deconstructing the Elements: Third Edition. The fire tutorial, im having problems getting the fire to show in the render. i can see the particle ticks in the viewport but the material assigned to the blobmesh isn't showing in the render. any ideas would be grateful. PS. i don't have the CD so i created the whole thing from scratch.

Allo all. First post here, but I float around CGtalk under the same name. Nice to meet you all in advance :) So I have a client thats asking for particles to swirl in from the outer edge of the camera, spin for a bit, then reveal their logo. The logo reveal is supposed to happen even as some particles continue to swirl in the center (rolling age test ofcourse). My initial idea is to use an animated radial gradient ramp, but at the moment the method I have (Event 1 Find Target to Event 2 Position Object) involves popping particles to that position, which loses all movement that the particles had gathered. I know there has to be a better way, so while I continue to RnD I wonder if anyone here has an idea? Cheers for any responses in advance. Brad

Is there any way I can get particles to move smoothly over a surface using Lock/Bond and Rotation-SpeedSpaceFollow? Every time a particle crosses an edge onto another poly, it jerks. No way to dampen that rotation? Thanks Mark

Hi, guyes. At first sorry for my english, I'm russian, so... ))) Ok, no more lyrics. I have a very very big problem. I need to use the mapping object operator from BOX#1, but it doesn't work. I don't know why. It makes me upset... :-( I want to creat an image from the sand, but the particles don't want to accept the color of my image. Here is the first screenshot of my PF Viewer below, the second is Scanline render (When I rendered with VRay I had the sae problem) and the third is the instance object (It's not renderable) What I'm doing wrong? If somebody can help me, I'll be sooo happy))) Thank's ;-)

Hi, My cache operator doesn't seem to work. I tryed it multiple times, and other methodes but it doesn't work. He manual 'updates' the whole animation, but when i slide the timebar the pFlow system will update itself anyway again for that frame. Can't a cache operator cache the scripted operators?

hi, i would like to control particle size and rotation after they have been birthed, sync them to audio controlloer for example or a keyframed loop, but once i change these values over time, they only change for the newly birthed particles, but i want them to change after birth once theyre already in the "air" can anyone help me achieve this? thank you

is it possible to animate motion with the birht texture, without needing speed to emit particles? that the animated noise or texture map will "bounce" particles up and down according to the heightmap, instead of needing speed to release all particles in some direction? (id like to audiosync particles, and have them go in x y or z direction for white and go back to original position for black) i guess lookin for something like a texture force operator (or animated speed/position operatr)

Hi, is there any way to undock parameters for animation? i am working with animation and always have to have particleflow editor open, it would be nice to just be able to have a floating paramater toolbar to work with :) (also because everytime i close and reopen particleview it resizes to default and doenst stay the way i left it)

there is a go to rotation operator, but how can i move particles from one event to the next "smoothly" ? .. letting particles from even01 fly to position setup in event02

is it possible to change viewport particle count to view every Nth particle instead of viewing only the first % of the existing ones

How can i disable my birth particles and just "use" the particles from 2nd Event? I want to render only particles that collided on object with birth particles, but not the birth particles themselves. The only way i can do this right now is to cache particles, turn off Birth Event, and for "one"time it allows me to show only particles from 2nd event, allowing me to render only those particles. But as soon as i scrub they are lost again. I need the birth event, else i dont have the collision particles i want :) Anyone can help with this workflow? Thank You

i have just noticed that the particles in viewport decrease speed when the particle editor is opened, when the particlecount is activated it is even slower, but howcome the particles are so much slower just because editor is open? just looking for ways to improve performance...

Hello everyone! i am new here and i would like help on a project im working on: i have made a system to produce nice rain, it collides on ground, and another collision for object, besides just splashing from the object and dying after certain age i would like to know the following: How can i make particles stay on object, let them travel downwards slightly and then fall off, like rain dripping off effect? So far i have: BirthEvent01 --> Collision 01 (ground) --> Event 02 --> SPAWN Splash BirthEvent01 --> Collision 02 (object) --> Event 02 --> SPAWN splash on object, i added a lock and bond, they just lock and even changing damping or friction doesnt make them continue downwards Any help would be appreciated! ian

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNFMhJCYodQ Director and writer : Hasan KARACADAG 3d max 9 , freebies , afterburn and fume fx

I added a cache operator to the global event to cache a pflow consisting of several events, something I have done for years, never a problem. After caching the frames manually (let's say frames 300 to 500) and try to render locally everything works fine. If I disable the cache operator and spend quite some time watching percentages everything fine, too. If I send the scene to backburner or save and reload instead, no particles show up at the respective frames. I tried to repair the cache operator/system the way described here in the forums. Nothing changed. I use three other pflows in the same scene. They all work fine (caching). I use Max2010, latest patches and connectivity extension installed. Anyone experienced anything like that before? Or knows why it might happen? I already lost 2 days of work (partially while rebuilding the whole pflow which did not help either), any ideas are appreciated. *edit Is it possible, that particles somehow change material ids, which where defined in the global event, while going to another event? This might be a possible reason

Will they become available for 2010?

Oleg, do you know what the particle limit is in the particle age map before the map starts to overwrite. We were doing some tests in this [url=http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=787921]thread[/url] and the particle age map seemed to begin overwriting around 65000 particles. Any insights would be great. Thanks John

I have a pflow that has one shape instance for the particles for most of the flow, then for one event I want the particles to use a different shape instance, then after that event, the particles return to the main flow to become the original shape instance again. When I do this, the shape instances seem to loose the ability to be animated (ie I'm using a point cached animated object as the shape instance). Should I place the shape instance into only the original event (along with the birth operator), and only have another shape instance for the event that I want pflow to use a different object, or should I place the shape instance operator in the global event? Any suggestions on how to retain the animation of my shapes in a shape instance operator?

When I make particles that spawn on a surfice but not at the same time, I want to give them a targa texture, a animated texture. The problem is the texture wont start on birth, The texture of all the particles starts at the same time. Does anyone know how to fix that? Thanx in advance, StiNoS

Hi everybody, well i am not a script user so i stuck at a point, i am using Bobo's ride the particle script for a scene where i am animating a paper and i wand a camera to follow it everytime so i basically modeled paper mesh and gave a particle this shape but he problem is that some time my camera follows the paper but some time don't. I am attaching the file, i hope someone could find time to solve this simple problem. Thanks in advance.

I stumbled on a thread yesterday by someone who did this but masked the actual geometry in a compositing app. I wanted to show that it is possible without that method. I didnt do any post work except shove the images together in Photoshop and add a description. Let me know if you guys want a tutorial, otherwise I will just leave the image. I can also upload the project, but you need Final Render. Let me know. - Evan

Hi all, After banging my head for a while trying to understand why the Mapping wasnt working, even tho it showed ok in the viewport , I figured out that the problem was with VRay (it renders fine with Scanline or MRay), it doesnt seem to understand it at all. As anyone experienced this problem? Any work around? Cheers

Hello, I have give speed by surface to particles to move on path. It complete path in 30 frams. Now i want to loop partiles. So it look likes that particles continuously move on path without jurk. How i made this ? Thanx

Hi, I want to create a drip system. Droplet on a glass surface are blast off by wind. That's no Problem so far. But I want my particle to behave like in the attached movie. I don't now how to control the particle velocity to get that stop and go effect. I have access to Box#3, but I'm not familiar with it. Any ideas?

im sure charley was just to modest to post it over here too :roll: i see alot of Knight Rider for the Orbaz gallery...... http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=5767006&postcount=1 with kind regards, Anselm

Found that at CGTalk, might be fun to play with! Actually John found it way before me and i'm a bloody liar :P http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=183&t=736910 http://www.scriptattack.com/images/vfanimtest1.avi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzbXUeZWKYo

I have a script operator that wires the spin velocity to a Speed By Icon's minimum speed value. This works perfectly in viewport and preview, but when rendered has no effect. Any ideas? Khye Kading

I want to animate a slo-mo effect for a pflow system. Current options are : 1: render at very high frame rate and adjust speed in after effects using time remapping 2: Apply a drag to the scene, and animate the drag value to 100% to stop the particles. The problem with this is that they do not continue their trajectories when the drag is switched off again. 3: somehow animate the internal timeframe in pflow. Similar to the function Particular (AE) has for animating the flow of time. Is there a way to achieve this effect from within pflow? (I have box 1 and 3)

Hello, I am trying to give different shape to selected particles. But selected particles cant show me any shape in viewport or render. Is it not possible ? Or this test is only for delete particles ? Thanx

Hi all. This is my fisrt post on Orbaz forum. I tried to find a solution on the different topics in a first time but i didn't. -So, I have a PFlow source emitting [b]one single particle[/b] at frame 0. -This particle is [b]driven by a Speed by Icon[/b] wich is [i]pathconstrained[/i] onto a circle01 (with an Out of Range controller) -After that theres a SpawnTest creating a [b]Trail[/b] with some speed divergence. -->All that stuff creates a trail of particles describing a circle (with a loop) -The circle01 is linked to an animated shere. -->All i want to do is to keep my trail of particles stayin into the circle when the sphere move. -So i use a Lock/Bond operator. -->But i did not managed to do the trick ! See the image above. If you have any solutions ...

Hi, I have take 2 PF named pf___ and pf__01. Put finalFlarespf in both of them. Take single finalflair and pick both. Problem is PF___ cant render flairs. If i turn off pf__01 then it render. I cant understand problem. Please solve my prob. Thanx

Guys, check this out just in case u haven´t yet! http://www.zhangy.com/main/index.php?module=documents&JAS_DocumentManager_op=viewDocument&JAS_Document_id=26 [i]"Beside work. I'm looking at CUDA(Compute Unified Device Architecture) recently and trying a pflow plugin to use the cuda for acceleration according to a particle sample in the cuda sdk. It works and almost play in real-time for more than 32000 particles with collision!!"[/i] [url]http://www.zhangy.com/ftp/Pflow/gputest.mov[/url]

Hello, Here i attech jpg and max file. particles move on circle path and after some frame stops on the path. I have take text 0 and 1, made group and take as shape instance. Lower part of circle text looks like ok but upper part text reverce on path. How can i put same rotation arruond the circle ? Thanx

Hello, How can i give motion blur in final render to particles? it seems default scanline ok. but in final render i can't see it. Thanx

Hello, Particles emits from icon and get collision with sphere deflector. After collision particles moves along sphere nicely. When i animate sphere toward the icon , particles goes insides surface and cant render. Speed by surface cant take animated surface ? Thanx

I would like to ask, how to achieve this effect? Thank you! [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=Pq2ixo00][img]http://www.postimage.org/Pq2ixo00.jpg[/img][/url]

Ansi is sad :cry: :? I have a case where i have multiple materials(ca. 60) i wanna render my particles with. In the "Material Static" it is set to "RANDOM" and "LOOP" as I have a fantastillion particles to adress the Mat. to. Works all fine until the first test tests TRUE. then they get a new Material from the Multi/Sub :( How can I tie a material to a particle permanently with having at least 3-4 tests the particle will run thru without box2 beta? Am I being stupid here? Hope someone can help real quick :idea: :roll: with kindest regards, Ansi

Greetings, We purchased the Orbaz PF Cache a couple of years ago. 1. It was for Max 9, can we upgrade to 2009? 2. Can we upgrade to the Netrendering version? 3. Is there a 64 bit version? Thanks, David

I have a scene with particles with dynamic material operators (set to match particle ID). It appears that the particles are getting different ID's on my different nodes causing materials to flicker. Is there something I can do to stop this? or do I need to render on the one machine.... or is there another cause I should be looking into. All the machines are x64, with max 2009 x64, box-3, creativity extension, and the latest hotfix installed. Any ideas?

[b]Hi everyone.[/b] I didn´t find a topic in the forum discussing this - maybe it´s a stupid question: Is it possible to control the size of particles with a grayscale-map? Even over time? For example to let a wave go through particles... I only found the possibility to control the distribution-density with a grayscale-map in the "Position by object"-operator. Thank you. [b]Sascha[/b]

i have particle stick on sphere and when collide deflector they fly to the cylinder and they are rendom position but i need they position from bottom to the top andyone can help me [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=gxbYHmJ][img]http://www.postimage.org/gxbYHmJ.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=PqqUEAJ][img]http://www.postimage.org/PqqUEAJ.jpg[/img][/url]

Hi In the attached file, how can I make the spawned particles centre on the main particle and travel along with it? Spawn seems to be creating particles at the pivot of the main particle, but the divergence isn't keeping up. Why does the main particle end up being at the head of the expanding sphere rather than at the centre? Thanks Mark

Hi All i have a live footage that has been 3D tracked and added some 3D models as particle objects. i want to texture the particles with the live footage but having some truble with uv it. any way to camera map the particles? thanks sahar

Hi, I would like to make planet boom something similar like this effect by Miguel Perez Senent ([url]http://www.miguelperezsenent.com/Media/Animations/planet.avi[/url]). I thing it was created in Houdini. Is it posible to make it in Particle Flow? I tried it. I started with sphere emiter which is emiting some chunk geometry when collides with ring deflector but the effect wasn’t good. Can anybody help me please. Planet explosion by Miguel Perez Senent: [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=aVoFRVJ][img]http://www.postimage.org/aVoFRVJ.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=gxmAYw0][img]http://www.postimage.org/gxmAYw0.jpg[/img][/url]

i have particles emitted from an object with a procedural noise map for desnity by material which works fine. I have animated the noise phase and i want the particles to move along with the shifts in the noise continuously. I guess i need a lock on emitter by density by material....or a find target with a density by material option in the find target point parameter. any ideas? p

Hi, I posted this on CGTalk and Sitni Sati forums, but no much luck in finding an answer. Whenever I use FumeFx Follow Op and then send particles into new event Max gives me the following error: ParticleChannelBool.cpp Line: 540 ------------- orbaz\maxsdk9\include\bitarray.h I'm working with Max 2008 and here is a test file http://www.grury.me.uk/Max08_FollowOp_Carlos.max Thanks in advance, Carlos

Is it just me or are there two shape operators listed in the depot and right click insert/append menus. Obviously I know that one is the shape plus from box1 and the other is the general shape op, but I thought they were combined. Well at the very least they have the same name in the depot, confusing end up grabbing one for the other. I uninstalled box1 before upping to the Creativity Ext, I guess maybe one of the Orbaz improved dll's is still there? I have Box3 too.

Hello, I have pick a animated bacteria as a shapeinstant. Backteria is editable mesh.Put modifires wave,edit mesh and noise to animate it. I have point chache it.delete all modifire and then take as shapeinstant. But particles are not animated. Why ? Please help.

Hi i have 2 pf sources and in each one of them there is a birthscript that basicly takes geometry and put particle instead(size position and shape) or a global chunksarray. the names of the arrays are different in each script but all the particles from both sources go by birth script1. anyone?.... thanks sahar

[quote]We've been working with Oleg, the creator of Particle Flow, for almost a year now, and he's brought some of his wonderful tools to 3ds Max. While this might appear to be Box1, it's actually something else as Oleg has been deep in our code and fixing problems and performing a much better integration. The result: faster performance, cleaner UI and full Box1 backwards compatibility. While much on the surface stays the same, there are a few things that have been much better integrated and performance and memory management are two of these.[/quote] [quote]Advanced Particle Effects Incorporate sophisticated particle effects into your scenes. PFlowAdvanced includes 12 operators new to 3ds Max Design, giving you easier access to a whole new range of creative options. The addition of the PFlowAdvanced technology to 3ds Max not only greatly enhances the functionality of Particle Flow, but it also gives you a high-performance, streamlined 3ds Max workflow, through which to access its features. - Numerous paint tools enable you to precisely place particles in your scene. Operators—including Particle Paint, Birth Paint, Placement Paint, Birth Texture, and Mapping Object—enable you to paint both particles and emitters onto specific parts of your objects. Other special effects include the ability to emit particles based on animated color data in emitter objects. - The utility operators have been integrated into the 3ds Max core to extend Particle Flow's capabilities, while giving you a streamlined workflow for creating particle effects. Clean up particle flow, synchronize layers, repair the cache system, save a custom flow as a preset, and automatically delete operators that are not in use and lock or bond particles to an object (improves on the former position object operator). - The ability to group particles enables you to perform specific operations on arbitrary subsets of particles. Quickly create multiple groups and work with as many of them as you like through such operators as Group Selection, Group, and Split Group - The PFlowAdvanced Shape operators greatly expand the Particle Flow Shape toolset. Define a particle shape beginning with a pre-existing shape—a vast range of 3D and 2D shape presets are available to choose from. Additionally, the Fast Shape Evaluation operation evaluates a reference mesh object on the final frame quickly and accurately, significantly improving performance. - Workflow enhancements include an Express Save operator that has been integrated with the 3ds Max auto-save functionality, backward compatibility with Orbaz Particle Flow Tools, Box # 1-based scenes, and general memory and performance improvements based on source code optimizations.[/quote] This is great news. Anything you want to say about it, Oleg?

Hi, How can i interect two pf each other? One pf is moving rendom inside cathod tube. Second pf that emits particle from corner and collide with first moving particles. How can i made this. Thanking you

I got curios about self-identification means in different languages; specifically, what languages use a single letter (as in English [i][b]I[/b][/i]) for self-identification. I used Google Translate tool, and here's the results. The auditorium of this forum is quite international - please let me know if translation is wrong for your native language. I restricted my search to the languages with Latin and Cyrillic alphabet. [b]I[/b] (English) [b]Аз[/b] (Bulgarian) [b]Ja[/b] (Croatian) [b]I[/b] (Czech) [b]Jeg[/b] (Danish) [b]Ik[/b] (Dutch) [b]Minä[/b] (Finnish) [b]Je[/b] (French) [b]Ich[/b] (German) [b]Io[/b] (Italian) [b]Jeg[/b] (Norwegian) [b]Ja[/b] (Polish) [b]Eu[/b] (Portuguese) [b]Eu[/b] (Romanian) [b]Я[/b] (Russian) [b]Yo[/b] (Spanish) [b]I[/b] (Swedish) Shortest - it's either [b][i]I[/i][/b] (Czech, English, and Swedish) or [b][i]Я[/i][/b] (Russian); Hmm.... Nothing related to particles... Thanks, Oleg B.

does the box1 have a different setup for different max versions.? i work on 64 bit but the setup says its only for max 7???? thanks

Hi, When i open 32 bit file in 64 bit Main birth event name is action recovry! Why? I cant change pf property as error comes "As invalid argument encountered". What should i do? THanking you

Hi everyone in my scene i have had objects made out of pieces of paper...think of it as toilet paper. i converted the papers to particles and i am trying to build the role of papers from the particles everything works but the problem is that i need them to come to the target on the right order(filling the target from right to left). any help will be apriciated. theres is a print screen attached thanks sahar[img] [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=gx1VXB2r][img]http://www.postimage.org/gx1VXB2r.jpg[/img][/url] [/img]

hi all what i need iseems simple, but i can't get it working. I just need my particles to stop spinning when they achieve a set rotation value...eg spin twice, then stop spinning. any ideas? cheers paul

How can i made a local wind in Pflow? thanks Gaetan

Hello, Here i attech jpg. Particles emits from icon and goto 1 tgt by rendom and slow speed(50). After 1 tgt they goes to 2 tgt by high speed(200) and then collide with deflector and delete. I want 1tgt to r tgt it goes starit not rendom point. So in find target i chage point-rendom to closest surface. But paticle taking centre point of 2 tgt not hole surface. This animation is inside cathod raytube. What should i do. Please help. Thanking you [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=PqaQKoS][img]http://www.postimage.org/PqaQKoS.jpg[/img][/url]

I'm trying to cache a pflow, but I cant seem to get it working. I put the cache operator underneath the render operator in the global portion of the pflow. I set my ranges, and set to manual update. I set my memory limit to 1Gb. After manually updating, the memory usage for all frames remains at 0, and there is no sign of any caching; pflow still updates. There's only about 2k particles, so I wouldnt have expected the cache operator to have any problems. I am using a birth material (box1) if that has any influence on the situation. Any ideas?

Hi to everyone, I'm testing PFlow in MAX.... What I would like to achieve is to *emit particles from any emiter (no problem-particles should be hidden), *hit the surface (no problem-collision and I'm instancing plane with texture applied) and then *"fade-in" (each particle with opacity and timing for example 1sec). I've tried to animate texture (alpha) or object properties (visibility), but I'm not able to transfer this kind of information into particle system. Does anybody experienced this kind of test with success? Thanks in adnvance. T

Hi, I have take cylinder with bend animation. Cylider is position object and as difector both. But paticles cant move accrding to bend animation. I have try lock and bond but not move. Position object cant take bend or vertex animatin ? What should i do for take bend animation ? Thanking you Alpa

Hi All I need your help with facing particles towards the camera. the thing is that i cant use the shape facing operator because my particles are instanced geometry. any idea? thanks sahar

Hi, I want to put 2-3 particles inside each particle in flow. Is it possible ? How? Please help Alpa

RayFire Tool 1.33 Plugin for 3ds MAX 9 , 2008 and 2009 released. [img]http://mirvadim.com/Images/RayFireTool_Comp.gif[/img] Shoot, explode, destroy, demolish, ruin, break down, cause havoc, blow up, burst, detonate........ The fracturing methods go hand in hand with TP or PFlow as easy to use pre-fracturing methods for further handling: [img]http://www.mirvadim.com/Images/Ad/RF133_Timber_small.jpg[/img] [url]http://www.mirvadim.com/Video/timber.mov[/url] Feature list: * Fragmentation. Allows you to fragment geometry objects. * Reactor Explosion. Allows you to realistically explode objects. * Reactor Hit. Creates realistic physical interaction of impact objects with bullets. * Displace. Automatically subdivides impact faces and creates detailed animated dents. * Holes. Creates holes and destruct Impact objects piece by piece totally in real time. * Instant Action. Allows you to shoot and explode without gun, manually defining all impact spots on impact object. * Various effects, such as Impact flash, Muzzle Flash, Particle Debris, Geometry Debris, Fragmented Debris from Holes, Smoke, Sparks, Blood, Decals, Bullets and any Custom objects which you can define by yourself. * Interactive Layer Manager. Allows you to interactively change properties in the already created effects, select, hide\unhide, freeze\unfreeze and delete any created layer or effect. * Multiple animated Impact objects. Also you can use skinned, pointcached or deformed in any other ways objects. * Automatic update system. Video demonstrations: Shooting 4MB. [img]http://mirvadim.com/Images/Ad/RF133_Shooting_small.jpg[/img] [url]http://mirvadim.com/Video/RayFireTool_Shooting.mov[/url] Glass Breaking 4Mb. [img]http://mirvadim.com/Images/Ad/RF133_GlassBrake_small.jpg[/img] [url]http://mirvadim.com/Video/RayFireTool_GlassBrake.mov[/url] Exploding 13Mb. [img]http://mirvadim.com/Images/Ad/RF133_BoxExpl_small.jpg[/img] [url]http://mirvadim.com/Video/RayFireTool_ExplBox.mov[/url] Check out http://www.MirVadim.com for more info. with kind regards, the RayFire Team.

Hi, I was wondering whether this is possible - I'll be interested in hearing all possible options to achieve this. I have a character that is comprised of different objects. At some point the character gets hit and the objects break apart, fall on the ground, and later assemble again to the character. These are big objects, not tiny sand-like particles. I can disassemble the character and re-assemble him using the good ol' Allan McKay method (sphere to teapot) - 'a la Sandblaster'. However - I don't necessarily want the particles to flow from one state to another - I want them to fall down naturally on the ground and be properly affected by gravity and dynamics. The problem with instanced shapes, though, is that they penetrate through the floor and into each other - which is why I'd rather opt for Reactor - which uses a cage as boundaries for the segments. SO here's the question - is there a way, and if so - how, to switch between PFlow and Reactor - and in such a way that at the time of the switch - they inherit each other's velocity? Alternatively - is there a way to prevent particles from penetrating everything, especially when using instanced shapes? Thanks a bunch.

Hello Oleg, Stop is very useful for me. But stop cant take animated object. So i use position object after stop. But i get jerk in particle position. Can you add this facility to stop that stop work with animated object ? Thanking you Alpa :lol:

Hi, particals moving in cylinder in rendom motion nicely. Cylinder is position object and deflector both. When i give spawm to paticles by travell distance, partcles cant take collision. Why ? What should i do to remain particles inside the cylinder ? Please help. Thanx

Hi! I cant quite find anywhere info about PFTools #1 Max 2008. Is there an update available yet? Thanks in advance, Carlos

Hi. Is there another C++ way to get particle positions from a PFlow system other than through IParticleObjectExt interface? Thanks.

Hi, I've read Afterburn 4.0 can accept data channels created by Cebas Thinking Particles. I was hoping PFlow with box #3 data operators may be able to to do the same thing? Any help much appreciated. Cheers,

Hi, Attech the jpg. Rbc are going inside each other . I want to seperate them at that position and stop for the moment. I use keepappart but not getting proper result. How can i do that ? Thanx [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=aV1Q4ug9][img]http://www.postimage.org/aV1Q4ug9.jpg[/img][/url]

Hello, I started the same topic in CGTalk, so sorry if people have already read it there! I've got a vortex with no radial pull, which is just making particles go round in a vertical circular tube. I'm trying to make them stop gradually as they orbit around the center of the vortex using the Orbaz Stop Gradually operator, however it doesn't seem to want to play ball with the Orbital Speed of the vortex. The easing is so tiny that the end result is either moving particles, or s fairly sudden (over 2 frames) stop, rather than a nice gradual slowdown over 50 frames, or whatever. I've included a picture here where I traced out the particle trajectory to a spline: [url]http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=206&t=616596#post5062434[/url] Has anyone come across this before and has a solution? If not, I'm probably going to script a solution (unless anyone has a better idea!?). It would be interesting to know how Stop Gradually works internally, so I don't follow the same route, which may also not work. Thanks! Dave

Hey Guys, Im having very annoying problems with pflow and collisions. I have a pretty simple setup. Particles emitting off a noisemap and selected faces. Gravity, drag wind etc and im also using the same mesh in a UDeflector and trying to get the particles to collide and bounce off. The mesh is pretty huge and had turbosmooth and displacement on it. The mesh im using was pointcached to begin with, then I ended up trying the skinned mesh, but nothing I do seems to make it collide properly. It will collide for the first 100 frames then stop or just not do it at all!! I have tried using a simple sphere as a deflector and that one seems to work fine, and have also tried changing the integration steps and recording the point cache at 0.2 sample rate. Im using Max9 and have box1 installed too. Any ideas?

Hi all I need to link between an object rotation values to particle speed values. anyone know how can i do that? thanks sahar

Hi I have been asked by a client to create what looks like ink in water form into a running human, Is there any way I could achieve this in Particle Flow, and is there anyone out there who would be willing to work on this project, I have a storyboard that I can email to people off list, mark@rendermedia.co.uk Many thanks in advance Mark

I have a really annoying problem with object based deflectors (UDeflector, UOmniFlect...) and Pflow. There is no collision detected if a geometric object, which "carries" particles, crosses a static deflector object. This seems to work correctly with standard Deflectors. Scenefile: http://www.3dpictureworks.at/download/deflector_issue.zip Is there a workaround for this? Thanks in advance!

Can anyone share me idea how can I make such particle that walks like a rubber on the plane randomly such that the more partcle moving at one direction affects other particle of same group moving another dirction and bringing to same direction creating some elastic effect. I get my scene file soon on the title

Well anyone teach me about making sand particle and making it move. And making particle sand material using Vray as well.

Hi everyone I am building a character that is made of all kinds of objects.(sphere,cube...) my question is how can i make those objects to be particles so i can play with them later but still position them on the exact right places on the model. thanks for any replay sahar

Hi I am looking for some help: i have two characters that are build from tube like objects. i need to make a transform from one character to the other. how do i specify the exact locations of the tubes(particles) on each of the characters. hope someone can help thanks

Hey, Looking for suggestions on the best way to pour particles out of a bag and have they collide with one another and, for lack of a better term, "mound up" when they collide with the ground. I guess a good example of what I'm trying to so is similar to sand running through an hourglass...except just pouring onto the ground instead of into a receptacle. in the end, i'd like to have a pour effect where there's a mound of particles on the ground and the particles roll off of each other. I've got the basics of the system build...the pour and the collide...it's the mound that i'm having a hard time with. thanks -b

I have an issue with a scene where I want to make a sparkler effect and it looks good if the emitter is stationary. The trouble comes when I constrain the emitter to a path and some of the particles get left behind. I know this is to be expected as now the emitter is moving so the particles would indeed be left behind as a trail. What I am wondering; is it possible to have the emitter linked to a path and not have its animation effect the speed of the particles? Here are some images to illustrate my question Image01 - emitter not constrained to path [img]http://www.intrinsia.net/transfers/ui_01.jpg[/img] Image02 - emitter linked to a dummy which has been constrained to the path. [img]http://www.intrinsia.net/transfers/ui_02.jpg[/img] So essentially I am looking to take the look of the stationary emitter but have it move along a path. As you can see once it has been linked to the dummy I get the 'comet trail' look. I can increase the speed of the particles but it still doesn't give me exactly what I need. Is there a way to have the particles emit relative to the position of the emitter or am I stuck to using some other method? Thanks in advance.

Hy Community, im running into a problem where it would be great to have an animated birth rate...is there a possibility to accomplish that task? kind regards, anselm

So here is our dilemma. We are creating a grid array of instanced boxes all with mixed shaders. These boxes need to sit dormant for about five seconds then randomly rotate on X 180 degrees. In mid flip these boxes shaders change all to the same shader. Picture an array of red, white, and green boxes. After five seconds they all flip in X (at random times or perhaps a collision test) and become blue boxes. Using Bobo's object vertex birth script, we've been able to get the array working and most of it close. We don't currently own Orbaz Box #3 and cannot find the Position Object+ operator for Max2008. The trouble we run into is making the switch from the dormant boxes to the ones that rotate in X. After the age test, the second instance operator changes where the particles sit and causes a pop in their shaders. Any help would be greatly appreciated. -chad

Hi Folks. I know this topic has come up in the past,- but I've only been able to find a broken link to the solution :( I have 5 pflow systems attached to vertices of animated planes (position object). Sometimes they move slowly, at other times very fast. Rendering out with vray motion blur gives me weird results. Over 200 frames, I get perfect motion blur for 70-80 frames or so, then the blur is "abandoned" all together for the remaining frames. Is this caused by sub-frame samplings? Object property settings? Pflow settings? Not quite an expert at pflow, using Max9 and vray 1.5.4 Thanks for your input, Kind regards, Mike

Hi, Particles move in cylinder rendomly.from them two particles come closer and disapper and at that spot new shaped particle (single) will born.This thing will happend time to time. Is this possible ? How ? Thanx Alpa

Hi, Particles move in cylinder rendomly.from them two particles come closer and disapper and at that spot new shaped particle (single) will born.This thing will happend time to time. Is this possible ? How ? Thanx Alpa

Hi, Particles move in cylinder rendomly.from them two particles come closer and disapper and at that spot new shaped particle (single) will born.This thing will happend time to time. Is this possible ? How ? Thanx Alpa

Hi, Particles move in cylinder rendomly.from them two particles come closer and disapper and at that spot new shaped particle (single) will born.This thing will happend time to time. Is this possible ? How ? Thanx Alpa

Hi, Particles move in cylinder rendomly.from them two particles come closer and disapper and at that spot new shaped particle (single) will born.This thing will happend time to time. Is this possible ? How ? Thanx Alpa

Hi, Particles move in cylinder rendomly.from them two particles come closer and disapper and at that spot new shaped particle (single) will born.This thing will happend time to time. Is this possible ? How ? Thanx Alpa

Does any one know if it is possible to use a keep apart operator to affect only one axis? I am creating a traffic sim and i need the cars to travel down a spline (using speed by icon) with a random speed variation. however this causes the cars to intersect. By using a keep apart operator i can make them avoid collisions, but the particles then ignore the speed by icon and go under the road or up into the sky. So ideally i would like the keep apart operator to only affect the cars in the direction they are already traveling and therefore stay on the path. Any ideas? thanks for any input

I'm trying to save memory and to scatter instances of a vraymesh with pflow. I set it to mesh per particle but it still doesn't work - by that i mean it takes even more ram than if i use regular meshes. Maybe it's the way pflow handles the instances? Anyone tried that?

Hi all! Scenario: I have a text that I have fractured using charleyc phenomenal fragscripts. The letters now consists of 100 individual meshes. I want these pieces to randomly be affected by a gravity force so the text breaks up and flies towards the camera. I can do this manually but I want the more procedural approach and use particles (or so I think). So is it possible to set up a particle system where one particles represents or binds one individual mesh? I´m planning to trigger the whole breaking-up event with either an agetest or a collision spawn with an animated deflector. Take care! Best Regards Matt

hi there. I'm in for my first contest on CGS' FXWARS for a couple of days now. Since the deadline is coming close, I wanted to know what you all think. This is my first entry ever and quite the first work with 3ds max' particle system 'PFLOW' ;) --> http://www.tobyatwork.de/3d-worxx/CGTALK_FXWARS/FIREWORKS/previews/test_005.mov What would you improve or add/delete? C&C is very welcome. Best regards, toby

Hello friends. I m new in particles world. please tell me that how to fade in the particles and fade out . because delete event just deletes the particles after age. I need to gradually fade out the particles.

I've done a small animation with a fire, growing along a path. Now, I've tried several approaches to emitt some smoke into the scene, depending on the age of a particle. Even an Age Test Operator seemed not to do the trick as I expected. Here's the short animatic of the fire: --> http://www.tobyatwork.de/3d-worxx/VFX/fire_on_line_grow/fireline_test20000.mov This is my particle flow so far... [img]http://www.tobyatwork.de/3d-worxx/VFX/fire_on_line_grow/fireline_smoke01.gif[/img] Does anyone have an idea on how to achieve this?

Hi, I have 40 objects that have been animated via Reactor. It is an explosion. I have a Birth OP set At:2 T:80 Then is a Postion Obj with the 40 objects as Emitters with Lock On Emitter set. Location is Volume. Problem is that not all the Emitters are being used. Regardless of the Uniqueness value. I need at least 1 particle at each emitter. I have tried Location = VOL, Pivot Surface, etc. I would have thought that the node would assign at least one point to each object if I told it to birth at least as many emitters. This does not appear to be the case. How can I get every Emitter Object to have at least one or more points, and not get a second point until all have at least one? Thanks, -David

hey guys, how do i simply link the rotation and position constraint of my particles to my emitter? When i rotate my emitter, particles are position constrained when using lock-bound, but their rotation is not, at least not on all axis. Thanks, A.

Hello, This is my first post here, so of course I thought why not let it be a question. Here is my problem I have to make an animation of text rising out of a body of water. Is this possible in Max, or do I need to start considering other possibilites. If this is possible in Max, is there a tutorial that could put me on the right path. Thanks for everything So far I have gotten this http://www.billa1.com/downloads/water.mov That is done with Dreamscape, but I am having problems with the Deamons colliding correctly, So I'm thinking about scratching Dreamscape from this and doing it solely in max. I read in Deconstructing the elements about creating a stormy ocean, but I am stil running into the problem with the text emerging from the water. Thanks for any help. I have already read Brandon Davis's case study on Intermedia, but He used RealFlow, which I am trying to get out of using.Thanks for any help. -Brandon

I understand that this this is probably Vray problem but maybe you can help me. Shape Mark operator shows only last particle when I render with Vray instead of all particles in Scanline render. Any ideas how to fix it?

Hi guys, I always have a crash when I try to animate the amount parameter in the spawn test. Can somebody try and see if it's just me? I remember having this problem for a long time now.

hey guys, i set up a very simple particle system in which i placed tiles (like floor tiles) and i use a collision object to make the floor appear, the collision object sending each collided particle to a next even in which i have an animated version of the floor tiles. The problem i have is that, even with turning off all values of my deflector, it still pushes the particles out of their original emplacement... and obviously, for my puropse, i would like to avoid that and keep them orderly placed. Any suggestions? :D So i know it's not directly related to the Orbaz Tollboxes, but since i just purchased Toolbox1, i figured maybe there is a simple way around it with it, in any case, thanks, any help would be welcome! I've put a max 8Sp3 + toolbox1 file on line here : http:perso.orange.fr/zanetti/Particles_Tiles_Growing.zip Pe@ce Adriano

Hi all, I'm having a problem which I overheard could be corrected with one of the tools (Box#1 or Box #3) but I cant pinpoint which specific tool I could rectify the problem with. My problem is this: I have an object that deflect the particles with udeflector (even other deflectors brings the problem) + the particles are under the influence of a vortex...till now everything works perfectly well...but, the object on which the particles deflect (actually the particles glide on this object so they constantly have to deflect...not just once...) so the object is Skined, and is kind of alive if you will, so when the object moves and deforms, the particles stop to be deflected and goes through! So I overheard that its a problem with the deflectors who in this case does not calculate all the way but onle once, or something like that...anyway, it's definetly a problem that should not exist so is there a tool / add-on that would actually rectify this? (or is it just me who does not setup my stuff correctly?) I'm only using the native tools that comes with Max 8, that is PF with udeflectors and vortex...no added plugins ... Thanx a bunch in advance for any help on this, Stef

Posted this over on the area but thought i'd post here also: Seem to of hit a bottleneck with the amount of faces that Pflow can pass at render time. Whether using scanline or finalRender the maximum amount of faces seems to be around the 5 million mark. This must have been encountered before, can anyone else confirm? 1st came across this in version 9 64bit. Haven’t moved over to 2008 as mid production but thought i’d try it with the core improvements and that but still same bottle neck. This is not about the max amount of particles, it is just about the resulting face count. The viewport actually appears to show all the particles but when you render particles disappear. Have just tested a 10 million face scene with just instanced spheres, no Pflow involved and it renders out fine so the weak link is definitely Pflow.

I'm trying to use the standard PF to create the car tracks from the wheels. I have four emitters for each wheel that emit particles towards a ground. When intersection occurs I use the Shape Mark to create the part of the track. The problem is that I can't orient particles to the wheel (car) orientation. [URL=http://imageshack.us][img]http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/3210/clipboard01dv5.jpg[/img][/URL] [URL=http://imageshack.us][img]http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/9793/clipboard02dr5.jpg[/img][/URL]

[code:1]max delete -- Remove the previous line for the macrorecorded script to run properly. -- It is not recommended using Delete hotkey during Macrorecorder session with Particle View.[/code:1] noticed this in the MAXScript Listener today, what does it mean exactly?

where can I find/download "ParticleActionsPlus" for max 9 x64? I need Position Object+ for placing particles on each vertex of an object not randomly Thanks!

Hi, I'm pretty new to pflow and I'm trying to setup a system to detect whenever an object (which is hand animated), is colliding with a deflector. fx whenever an object hits the water, some particles spawn from that possition. or like when a character's feet hits the ground, some dust spawns. I've got the particles to spawn and lock to the possition of the dummy objects, but when the particles hit the deflector nothing happens. They don't go to the next event. If I animate the deflector to go through the particles it works, but that's not what I want. Does anyone know how to do this properly? I have included the the scene below: [url]http://www.jbdesign.dk/dump/locktest.rar[/url] Any help would be great :) Thanks, regards, Jacob Børsting

Hey All, I found a bug and thought I would share it along with a solution. This may already be known, but I figured I would share it in case others run into the same thing. To create the problem: - I created independent max files containing different particle flows. - Merge the files into a new max file It seems that multiple particle views can be created with the same name which can render your particle flows invisible in the PF view. To fix: - I opened the maxscript listener and "select $particle*", when I print $ I got: $Particle_View:Particle View 01 @ [0.000000,0.000000,0.000000] $Particle_View:Particle View 03 @ [0.000000,0.000000,0.000000] $Particle_View:Particle View 02 @ [4.958793,3.561117,8.568209] When I deleted particle view 01 and 03 my PF view populated back with the particle flows again. I'm unsure if you are only allowed one particle view -- but it seemed to conflict somehow. I'm sure someone else understands what is going on there -- but thought I would share the solution that ended up working for me. J.

Another day, another question :) I have some fire that is on a stick and it burns nicely. It actually licks upwards and spews some smoke. Everything looks nice. The problem I have is that when the stick is animated the particles are left behind. While there is some 'realism' to this, I would like the particles to act as though they are their own system and will always: Create a licking flame w/ smoke that holds together as though its PF source was not moving. In other words, I would like to make something like a flow of particles that would move around as though it were like a lightsaber. A solid grouping that is attached rather than orphaned off. Thanks, j. [url=http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=aVmnxK0][img]http://www.postimage.org/aVmnxK0.jpg[/img][/url]

Hello again (hello Oleg :), I seem to have a lot of questions lately -- let me know if it is getting annoying :). Can PF setups be reused for other scenes that have a different scale. For example, I have a PF that was built too large. I've tried scaling it down, but obviously all the variables are not scaled along. For example, the distance the particles are traveling have not scaled along with the particle size. I'm assuming this is either as problematic as it is trying to scale bones or there might be a tool of some sort that takes care of this? Jason

Hello all, :) I don't have access to plugins and need to generate some fire effects fairly quickly. In that regard I have decided upon using 2D facing particles to create fire. I have set this up using one render node and several births that render out facing geometry for smoke, embers, flames, and a brightness flicker During the playback however, the draw order seems to be random. At times the flames are in front while in others they head to the back. Is there a way to explicitly state the draw order for the particles in a single render? Thanks in advance, Jason

Forgive me as I'm just starting to play around with scripting and pflow but I'm looking for the command that would allow me to change 20 sources all at once using a maxscript command. So in this case I want to change the viewport quantity on all 20 source operators at the same time from 5% to 100%... rather than go through 1 by 1 I'm thinking there must be a way to accomplish this. Any ideas? thanks in advance. edit: figured it out... selected the sources and entered $.Quantity_Viewport = (n) and voila. :)

Hi, I have made animation in which particles are moving inside the cylinder nicely at a rendom speed-20.cylinder is position object and as a defletor in collision.When i animate the cylinder from one side to other , speed of paticles suddenly increases and they move very fast in cylinder.Why it so ? What should i do to keep speed slow ? Alpa

Im trying to apply a material to my particles for animation/renders...not showing up. thanks Rob 2HM

Whats the easiest particle set up to create a wind tunnel test look thanks see image ref. [url=http://upload3.postimage.org/315862/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload3.postimage.org/315862/windtunnel.jpg[/img][/url]

Whats the simplest way to create an "Air Stream" that flys over the shape of a car? thanks! www.twoheadedmonster.com :lol:

Where do I find the Particle Paint tool from Box #1???Its not in my Depot!!! Thanks [url]www.twoheadedmonster.com[/url]

NEW TO THE FORUM AND TO PFLOW. Im trying to get particles to attach AND align in a specific orientation along a twisting path (Road). Been working with the Lock/Bond operator, but its not giving me the results. :? any advice? thanks in advance! :D

I have several fragments, animated by hand. I want keep all of them in one single emitterlist. The fragments start moving at different times. From that point, when they start moving (optional several frames before) I want them to start emitting particles. I think this is no big deal with the Birth script operator, but I'm no scripter. Maybe you can help out a little? cheers Michael

[b]Here's the particle effects which i am after. Can anyone tell me how i can achieve this effect ? Link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pPObMD3gF74 Thanks[/b]

Hello peeps! I'm having a spot of bother with my render. I'm animating some facing sprites using Pflow in Max 9. The particles are moving from right to left in the scene while the camera has some slight noise to simulate camera shake. The camera position is unchanging. I'm rendering out a 64-bit velocity image with Vray 1.5 and using a trial version of RSMB in AE to comp the motion blur in post. For some reason, the motion blur is not rendering correctly with RSMB. You can see a comparison below with the multi-pass method of motion blur. (renders the scene 12 times with incremental advances of the frame and combines the result) [url]http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=117222[/url] As you can see from the bottom image, the motion blur is incorrect. Any ideas as to what could be causing this? I've tried numerous settings in both Max and AE but can't seem to fix the problem. Cheers

Ok so this is something I am trying.I am trying to morph a Mini Car to a Lambourgini with particles.So far the morphing has succeded only if the cars stay still....But as soon as I animate them...the particles are not moving along with the car and they stay in their previous palce......I have followed Allan Mckay's Particle Dispersion Tutorial form his website.....can anyone solve my problem? Thanks in advance, Subhro

Ok....so this is like a Particle system I want to create but dont know what to do.I want to show that a ground is destroyed from underneath the surface as If something exploded from under the surface of the ground and the ground first rose up a little showing cracks all around and then it quickly fell down thus creating a huge crater.For eg in the movie War of the Worlds,where the machines come up from the ground for the first time and thats the kind of damage I want to show......Any idea guys?I want it to be as realistic as possible.It will include Dust rising up and falling down,ground shaking,breaking,u know!...the stuff. PS:-I already tried PArray and its not a very good option.... Thanks in advance, Shub_bro

hi i am trying to wrap some text around character . i am using PF to genrate partice . is there any other way to do this thanks

Hi everybodies, Im playing with the find target. Everything is working fine. The particles take the shape of the target. My problem, is that I would them to reconstructe the shape by parts, and not directly the whole object. For exemple if my target is a humain. Instead of taking the shape of the whole humain at the same time, I would like to start with the finger, than the arm, the body, the head, etc. Is it possible? Maybe with a particle box x? I hope you understand my english :oops: Thank you very much :lol:

Hi- Im interested in spawning a set of particles that inherit the parents speed but are birthed with either an offset or better yet from the surface of the parent. Any thoughts? Thanks -Michael

Hi!!. everybody. I made the example [b]Particle Size by Inter-Particle Distance with Box#3[/b]. It works perfectly when I use Shape or Shape Plus but It doesn't work with Shape instance. Anyone know how can I solve that problem? Another question if it's possible, are there any ways to control the scale of shape instance and position relative to size and position of polygon's emitter? Thank's a lot!!!

I have a collection of INodes which wrap IParticleGroups and I want to update the particles within so that I may extract them from PFlow. Currently, I get the associated IPFSystem, set it to the render state, then call Update() on the IParticleGroup. I've run into a few snags however, since the group doesn't actually update. It just stays at 0 particles. Any advice regarding the proper mechanism for updating an IParticleGroup to a given TimeValue?

im trying to export plfow data so i can get the particle system working the same as in max in my 3D engine. i've looked over the pflow source and the source for the gravity modifier, but what ever i try i cannot get my system to look like it does in max. my particle has a velocity value which i multiply by delta time each frame like so: particle->pos += particle->vel * deltaTime ive got particle speed working like so: particle->vel = direction * speed where direction and speed are raw values from pflow now gravity is the troublesome part: direction = nodePos - particle->pos dist = length(direction) direction = normalize(direction) if (decay != 0) strength *= exp(decay * dist) particle->vel += direction * deltaTime * strength * influence where influence = 10 thats 10,000% as in the pflow force influence dialog box strength and decay are the raw values from max any ideas whats wrong?

I wonder if it is possible to deform particles animated with Speed By Icon along the same spline path as the path-constrained Icon. The effect should be similar to the standard Path Deform Modifier of 3dsmax. But using lots of particles. :)

I have toolbox 3 demo.I am very confuse to see suboperators.I cant understand from where i start and how to use suboperators. Please help

hy guys, i have issues with allan´s "drip_system III" rain system on moving objects. everything works like a charme in his demo scene on a sphere. so does it on my custom object (a character). but on moving and animated objects it wouldn´t work properly due to following the char-meshes movement issues. lock/bond was my first thought but i still don´t get it working any input? kind regards anselm [url=http://upload8.postimage.org/313738/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload8.postimage.org/313738/rain.jpg[/img][/url]

Hi, I am on MAX 9 and I am trying to achieve a dispersion effect by using a position object operator. I have a gradient ramp map with a small white strip in the middle indicating where the particles should be emitted. If I put this material on an object everything works fine. But I want the "emitting area" to wander over the object. When animating the white strip in the gradient ramp, everything works fine as well. However, when animating the uvw map modifier (gizmo position) (which has the same effect of a white strip wandering over the object) the density by material function seems to have no effect as no particles are emitted on the white area. What is strange about it... if I manually move the gizmo around in the viewport the particles are emitted always where the white strip on the object but not when I animate the gizmo and hit play. Should these two things not be essentially the same ? It seems that the stack is evaluated differently or the the PFlow does not notice that the mapping gizmo is animated. Please, I would be really happy if somebody could explain this wierd behaviour ! Markus

[b]Actually i have to create a scene in which car is coming on a snowy road and splashing down the snow particles all over. I want to create this effect and i am also posting a snapshot of what i want. Image Reference [img]http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/3531/leoinsnowwi6.jpg[/img] And [img]http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/8382/snowraceyn5.jpg[/img] Thanks[/b]

I'm having trouble looping the below file. I need a lead-in to the loop, so I'm feeding off a Split to a Delete. Try this .... -- Compare frames 900 and 1800. They should be identical. -- Turn on the SplitAmount and compare again. The trails are different. -- Change the Spawn Divergence to 0 and compare again. The trails are identical again. What's causing this problem? Why should Divergence be disrupting the loop only when the Split is used? Here's the file.... http://www.digikoku.com/download/070503/spawn_looping_001.zip Thanks Mark

hi i asked a similer question on cgtalk, but i wanted to instance Vray proxies to the realflow particles, my guess is that if i can instance dummies to the rfloader particles i can use those to drive my vray proxies the question was asked why we would want to use realflow... well it's not so much that we want to use realflow but that we using the realflow loader to get a Houdini based particle system into Max. it also important not to only get the transform, but the rotation from the particles to drive the instances!! anyone have any ideas? is there a way to get houdini particles into pflow? that would make it a bit simpler. the main reason i want to use vray proxies is because i can't use the regular instancing thats built into the RFloader, my system just runs out of memory at 2300 particle intances using Vray. thx jason

hi i sketched an animation of 6 "objects as particles" with pflow. now i would like to further refine the animation by hand. Q1: how can i convert "Pflow animation -> geometry animation"? or at least Q2: how can i made some "geometry snapshots" of the Pflow animation? i'm using 3dsmax9 any hints? many thanks Ueli

If I load the expemple file " Spider for Caching" in max 9, the spider go through the mesh, instead of follow it. The file is the same i load in max 8, where it works good. If I'm not wrong, that file don't use box 1 or 3 operators, but only script file, anyway you can find it in box tool exemple files. I try it withg max 8 with service pack 3 and tool box 1 demo(work good), and max9 (with extension pack) and box 1 demo (don't work properly). Can you replicate it? Where is the problem? Thanks.

Hi , Can toolbox 2 have this facility of particle studio have ? That the order particle born from object (top-bottom, left-right, etc). Rahu

Can particle studio interact with Particle flow? Why particle studio is still under development? There is a reason I have to buy Particle studio if I have box 1? And box 3? What is the other plugin made by orbaz that can interact with Particle flow? Thsanks in advance.

Hi I'd really appreciate some help with a net render problem. I'll link the file below. It's max9. [url]http://www.digikoku.com/download/070415/render_fail_070415_001.zip[/url] Scrub to frame 300 and render locally. Now net render out the sequence from frame 300. It seems the second PFlow system isn't rendering. The frames come out empty here. I have a feeling I've come up against this trouble before by instancing the node containing the Render operator. But this time it's a seperate operator. Can someone give me a hand? Thanks Mark

Hello all, I have a bunch of metal pins that I want to bounce off this table. They actually come exploding forwarding, and i have them deflecting off. There are some issues however. The pins go through the table, and they dont rest and rotate across it. I am just a simple deflector aligned to the table top. I have attached an image and I can provide the file if need be. I am still noob, and would value any assistance. Cheers [url=http://upload7.postimage.org/640816/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload7.postimage.org/640816/scene4_0022.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://upload7.postimage.org/640874/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload7.postimage.org/640874/Untitled_2.jpg[/img][/url]

I'm wondering if there's any way I can spawn particles in a geometric pattern, like a family tree diagram. I only need a basic spawning PFlow system each time forking into two, and that's up and running. But of course Divergence only gives me random results. Anything I can do to put some kind of order into it? Thanks Mark

Hi, I try particle age map .That is fine that paticle have gredient colors according to age.When i spawn the paricle it remove the effect according to their age and come gredient according to paticles.I want to show that the hot air goes up and becomes cool.So i want red to blue gredient according to age with spawm. How can i do this Thanking u Alpa I attech image that have prob. [url=http://upload7.postimage.org/539194/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload7.postimage.org/539194/00.jpg[/img][/url]

Hi to all, i am new here and i start with a question.... :D I am trying to use finalflares from Cebas with particle flow, but there is a big problem: when i use the option "particle magic" in the setting of finalflares, it assign a random color and intensity to every particle but, after the first particle die, the flares begin to flicker casually. It seems to me that the id of particles change randomly after the first particle die. Any suggestion-fix for this? Thanks!!!

I Can't use properly lock bond. I just want to send particles to a moving/morphing shape and particles to slide along the surface, like pourring water on a face. I cant find correct setting to just keep the particles on the surface! some particles are projected all around I don't know why. Please help Loran

Can there be an alternative to lock&bond if one's not having pf flow toolbox ? I am having a scene in which particles need to be stick to surface and i don't have pf flow toolbox.

I'm unable to get particles to move along a surface that is constantly changing form. The spline along which the particles move stays fixed while the plane has hills and valleys moving up and down. How do I get the spline to move with the plane? I've tried linking, attaching, conforming.......no luck. Any help appreciated. Grant

simple system parts are born on one end of a plane, the plane is bending into a spiral shape, the parts move across the surface of the plane, one side to the other. the problem, once the plane reaches its spiral shape, the parts dont follow the shape very closely. hmmm... I will post a sample scene when I get home by explanation is way too vague. cheers

Making a scene where I have a wall composed of many screens; each screen being a particle. I have an animated clip that I am using as a texture and I wanted to have each particle play the same video, but at different time offsets. So for example, Particle 1 starts the video at frame 25, Particle 2 starts the same video at frame 175, Particle 3 starts the video at frame 250. Is this possible without having to create a multi-sub material for Pflow to draw from? thanks!

Hi , Whenever i use 24 to 25 events in single flow i have prob in update by cache and render.It takes 30 to 35 min to start render.I have 1 GB RAM and 2.40 GHz intel dual processor.If i split into 3-4 flow then render is cresh .Particles not more then 10000. Why this happend ? THanking u Alpa

Hi All, I am having problems using Vortex in max, my particles are all buntch up in the render but look fine in the scene has anyone come across this before. I have uploaded an image so you can see what I mean, www.rendermedia.co.uk/downloads/pflow/error.jpg Best Regards Mark

I keep getting crashes in R9 32bit when using Keep Apart. Depending on the number of particles, it crashes out when processing the flow over time (even during render/net render). It kind of acts like a memory issue, but I am always well under the RAM I have. Has anyone else noticed this?

Hi I was wondering how easy it is to specify the position of particles within a scene, I have a sequence and at the end I need my particles to be in an exact alignment, I have looked at position object+ but whether I place it in the stack the particles always start from that position as opposed to finishing in that position. Many thanks in advance Best Regards Mark

Hi I read your forums often and like them, but I'm wondering if you could install a tagcloud to make it possible to see which words and themes are popular on the forum, such as [... moderated as not related to CG <administrator>] have but they show tags and trends for the whole web, here it would be only for the forum posts.

I was trying to make this type of explosion but couldn't get it. Could anyone tell me how we can create this ? link: [url]http://s120.photobucket.com/albums/o180/re_edge/?action=view&current=explosion.flv[/url]

I have not been able to get the PF "force" operator to recognize a "pathfollow" spacewarp as a force. It IS listed as a "force" in the create panel. This is what I'm trying to do: A simulation of particles, SUSPENDED in a medium body liquid, flowing thru a tube that has turns in it. Along the way there are partial obstructions in the tube, changes in tube diameter and other restrictions to the "flow" of the "liquid" that the particles have to react with (ie deflect). What I've tried: Using a spline path down the center of the tube I was able to use a path constraint controller with a "speed by Icon operator" to get the particles to go down the tube and by adjusting the size and angle of the emitter was able to distribute the particles to "fill" the tube side to side. The problem with this is that this approach is all or nothing and the particles, you can't adjust a degree of influence and the particles don't honor any of the collision test operators for the UDeflectors that are the "sides" of the tube and the other "restrictors" (ie deflectors) in the tube. I next tried a gravity force in the general direction of the desired "flow" but the particles bunch at the "turns" in the tube and there was no sense that they were "suspended" in a moving liquid but more like a bunch of bb's pored down a tube rattling around until they found their way to the end of the tube. I when thought if I could use the "pathfollow" space warp as a force operator to give the particle the general tendency to want to move down the tube in the direction of the path, that I could dial it's influence down to a point where that coupled with the deflector collision test would give me what I needed.... But alas, even though the pathflow spacewarp is created as a "force", it apparently is not recognized as such by PF. I could not select it as a force with the PF force operator I guess what I need is a gravity spacewarp that uses a path for it's direction of force ??? Any ideas Thanks Joel Hughen

This is something I've had a problem with for a while. I'm not sure what causes it, but when I freshly create a particle flow system in a scene, dragging in each node from the dock, everything works fine and dandy. If I put a cache operator in the global node, it will correctly cache the system. However, if I merge the particle flow in, or if I use a Preset Flow from box#1 (which is effectively a merge) the exact same system will be extremely slow, and won't cache itself, forcing the system to re-calculate the system at each timeslider change. Am I missing something here? Is there a reason my systems act slowly after merging? Anyone else experience this problem? The workaround I've been doing ever since I've had this problem has been to completely reconstruct the flow using new _fresh_ nodes from the dock, and copy/paste the parameters over from the old, infected nodes. The moment I copy/paste a node from the old (infected) flow, the new flow will not cache and will exhibit all of the problems of the old flow. So every node needs to be freshly created in the file. Have a good day :) Hope someone knows what's up

Hello, I searched but couldn't find any relevant posts: If I have one PF system with two emitters, how do I offset one emitter to x=5 max units and the other emitter to y=5 units? Is there an "offset" node somewhere? Thanks! M

Hi, Particles moves in cylinder randomly.When a particle touches a the surface of cylinder,it turns into a drop of water and move along the surface and goes downward .How can i do ? Please help me. Thanking u Alpa

hi i am trying to control particle scaling with texture(black/white) map . but i dnt know how to go for it . please help me. thanks in advance nitesh

Im using Max 8 and I have a very simple setup with pflow but not sure why I am getting this problem. I have a spline path that I bound the SSF icon and a series of test cube particles that follow the path. however when the particles near a vertex (this is an S path) they shift and reorient their position as they pass through the vertex. I thought for sure change the verts to smooth (they were bezier) would fix it but same thing. The setup is fine except for this one point. This happen to anyone, and if so how do i fix it?? thanks

Hello, is the upper limit of 10 million parts how many parts that a single source can produce over its entire lifetime, or produce at one time? it seems that after birthing 10 million parts the source is unable to produce any more parts, even if exsisting parts are killed. is that correct?

Hi Is this possible with the standard max pflow? Or with any of the Toolboxes? I need to use a texture as a target so that rising particles will stick to an invisible mesh at points on the texture where the luminance is over a certain value. Simple black/white would probably also be ok. Thanks Mark

I think this is the best place to post this query.As i just entered this forum although i am not new to particle flow. Actually i just developed a explosion test which have some problem with pf flow. The problem is when the explosion happens and the debris falls down onto surface some of them collide with the surface but few of them get penetrated through it. I am really confused like why its happening, i showed the animation to some people but they also can't figure out what's the problem is, i am posting the screen capture of the pf events of the explosion. Hope to get my problem solved. [url=http://upload5.postimage.org/89974/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload5.postimage.org/89974/node_particles.jpg[/img][/url] Thanks

Hi, I have set flow in such way that particles are moving inside the cylinder rendomly.I want they collide with each other .I try keep apart.But I can't success.Can u send me max file of this type of animation please. Thanking u. Alpa :cry:

I am using pflow for a group of butterfles in a swarm. i want the wings to be blurred as they fly. image motion blur just blurs the each butterfly as it moves through space but doesnt take the wings into account. the blur is equal for the whole object (its an animated shape instance). Object motion blur (as i read on here) doesnt work well with plow. it just makes like a 2 frame blur no matter what the settings are. I tried multi-camera pass and got the same strange blur as with object, no matter how many passes or subs i put in. Is there any way to get the more realistic blur I want for this kind of object with out using Vray? Thanks

please help i dloaded the pftool freebie ,installed it but couldn't find it in 3d max Can anyone explain how to use it ? thnx

Hey all, I'm a PFlow newbie in a bind, so I hope someone can help out! By the way, Oleg, PFlow is awesome! If you answer this post, I'm a friend of Fred Ruff who helped design the interface, I'm sure you remember him (last time I saw him he told me to say hi if I ever posted- I know he would help, but I temporarily misplaced his e-mail address). Anyway... I've got a scene where I'm using instanced geometry (feathers) as my particles. They need to be attached to a surface shape at their spawning. Then some birds (geometry) fly through them and blow the particles apart like feathers blowing up in a pillow fight (basically). Here are my problems... 1) I've got a udeflect set up with the "birds" attached to it and a collision event using the udeflect. I've got upwards of about 10,000 particles and when I animate the position of the "birds" to collide with the particles, nothing happens. The "birds" are editable polys. 2) The "feathers" need to be attached to the surface of another geometry and they don't all stick, some are offset in space away from the object. I can't afford PF Tools to use Lock/Bond so is there another way to make sure they are all stuck to the geometry? This is really important for the shot! 3) I've got 2 wind forces, a drag and a gravity force being the result of the collision event (I'm testing it with a sdeflector). It seems though that the "explosion" of particles starts slow and speeds up (is it inheriting the speed of the deflector?) and I need the reverse. The "feather" particles need to "poof" quickly up & out and then slow down and float to the ground. What are some good settings for the forces and should I use an age event to apply the gravity force? 4) How can I get the 4 or 5 "birds" to disrupt all the particles. Some aren't in direct contact with the "birds", so they don't move. Sorry, I know it's alot, but I'm on a stupid deadline of about 4-5 days, and I'm a bit behind (can you tell? ;) ) Thanks in advance! P.S. If need be, I'll post my .max scene later today.

Hi, Does anyone know how to emit particles at different periods within one source? I want to emit different amounts of particles at certain times. For example: 10 particles between frame 1 and 10, 20 between frame 15 and 30.. Do I need to create different particle systems for each or can this be done within one system? Thanks, Theun

Hi Folks, I use find target a lot as a way to guide particles along but I've found that when I use smaller scale scenes and lower speeds in the find target controls, the particles move in a really linear way between the various targets that I have set up. What I'd love to be able to do is have the particles find the targets overall but with a less linear movement - say for example if I have particles flying along that then get sent into a find target event via a collision or age test, I'd like them to gradually turn towards the target as opposed to immediately changing direction - is this possible? I would use speed by icon along a path but in the case of my current job, the targets are parts of a human body and have to be tracked to live action footage so a spline wouldnt do it. Any thoughts? Cheers for a wonderful tool! John

helloo this is really challenging to acheive http://www.glassworks.co.uk/search_archive/jobs/cailler_new_branding/index.shtml just chk this out & pls tell me is it possible with PF thanks nitesh

Hi everybody! I just came across something quite odd. Forgive me if you already know all this, but I didn't, and this may help others...... When using a Shape Instance, you lose the ability to animate the scale control in the operator. This is different from the standard Shape, where you [i]can[/i] do this. The solution is to place a Scale operator after the Shape Instance in the flow, set it to absolute scale, and then auto key as normal. My first effort to get round the problem involved animating the actual object I'm using as the instance. I scaled it over 50 frames, then turned on Animated Shape in the Shape Instance. Do NOT do this!! This method causes PFlow to work much harder (I'm sure Oleg can say why) and, when trying to cache, I ran out of memory and my scene crashed - recovery failed!!! :evil: As I said - sorry if this is obvious, but I searched for the answer and couldn't find it - so here it is! :D Z.

Hi All Is there a way I can cull particles on a speed by icon bound to a path, the camera is moving along throughout the scene and as such the distance from the Pf source and camera is increasing so I am getting a lot of redundant particles that take up render time and are not seen, as particles run the entire length of the spline Is there a way I can have particles spawn within a certain area behind and in front of the cameras? Thanks in advance

hello, is there a way to apply additive speed to particles that got there motion from inherited emmiter movement. If I add any of the speed ops it overrides the inherited motion. www.giantapestudios.com/pflow/inherit.max File includes 3 systems 1st works correctly but no added speed applied 2nd speed operator overrides motion inherit 3rd parray which handles it both ways (and annoyingly quite a bit faster) File also show the udeflector issue, which seems to be a max issue as all particle systems in max seem to have problems with it. cheers

Hi just wondering how well keep apart and speed by icon work together, I have a scene with 2 lots of particles travelling along a spline via a speed by Icon however no attempt is made to stay apart, this is the order in Pflow Birth Keep apart shape Instance Position Icon Spin Display speed by Icon (absolute time) (event duration) colision (bouncing off inside walls in tube even if I differ the order of events still no joy Thnx in advance

hi ts there anything to control rotation speed (like after begain rotation it should end within 5 frames) thanks nitesh

Hi, I am trying to animate a leaf from a tree get taken away by a stormy wind. I have tried several wind and vortex forces but the result is rather chaotic. Does anyone have experience with this or is there a good tutorial? Thanks, Theun

Hy All! We have a serious memory issue where i work at the moment: we wanna render alot of polygonal object (mostly medium polycount) as Shape Instances. Caching doesn´t lead to the deserved result sice there´re too many objects...We can´t render in layers because we need vray motion blur :( is there any workaround for like thousends of massive polycount shape instances? any optimizing i didn´t think about jet except of reducing polys in the master polyobjects? i have to say honestly i never worked with such polycount an PFlow :( regards anselm

ve been looking at the ad Budweiser "The Wave" by Method Studios -http://www.methodstudios.com/movie/747.html I'm trying to get a similar look using the rotating/flapping boards. Is there any way to attach particle rotation with texture map for card flipping . Can some sort of script be used to achieve this look? Can someone point out how to go about getting this to work.

Trying to create an Imprint trail that would make a freeze of the object in it current position & rotation, this simple task is not as simple as I thought. Here is an image example. [url=http://upload4.postimage.org/1505842/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload4.postimage.org/1505842/temp_arrow_01.jpg[/img][/url]

Hi All I am using Find Target, Keepapart and speed by Icon, in Max8 standard P flow no upgrade etc, is there any rule of thumb in using these, a so far my particles are travelling along the path however they travel outside the inside wall, and some do not keep apart at all? Many thanks in advance Mark

Hi there, I've been playing about with pflow trying to recreate the same effect as the nano advert: http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/ads/ basically i got particles emitted from the face of a cube and being a bit displaced by some random forces. i think my problem is that i cant get the same look with those sort of layered lines. could anyone help me figure this out please?

Hello Guys I looking for help with my problem, maybe you could help me. I'd like to create PF emitter on Parray particles. Parray particles just fly free, their not creating any object or anything like that. So i'd like to ask for help, i tried do almost everything that comes to my head but without any results. With this scene i have another problem. I'd like to create "animation veins", that will be spread some kind of fire/energy around. For this i use very awsome script from this forum "PF Spliner 3" ( http://www.orbaz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=311&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=particles+path&start=30 )- It was answers for my pray, god bless creators ;) - it's seems working fine, however when i start emmiting particles from created and animated splines, than particles are going only from the top of the spline. and I'd like them to emitt them from whole "drawing" spline not only from one point. Could anyone help me please. Thank you for this awsome forum, it save my life :) Chris

hi all i am having particles land on the floor and they are spinning as they fall, this is my set up 1. collision detect about 50cm high from the floor, this then passes onto event 2. below 2. go to rotation ( with no pipe for the test output) followed by random horizontal rotation op. works well, also in this event is the actual floor collision which has a 100% friction so stops the particles pos. though they still rotate. this works ok (apart from the lack of bounding box collision) now when i make the goto rotation test timing shorter, i find that some particles now leak the event 2 collision and pass through the floor. anyone know why this would happen? cheers paul

I have a Question I was wonder if Oleg might be able to help shed some light on, I have ascene with some cells running a vein, I have rendered them out via Backburner on a network however viewing the frames there are several where the particles appear different as though a different scene was rendered out. I have uploaded a demo here http://www.rendermedia.co.uk/download/misc/cells.wmv Many thanks in advance Mark

Hy community, i have a maybe stupid problem concerning the group select operator. the selection insode a meshed object seems not to work :( i was lucky to get a workaround going that fits for me but maybe there´s a way that works with geometry as well... hopefully i´m just not clever enough :oops: :wink: [url=http://upload4.postimage.org/1286386/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload4.postimage.org/1286386/stadium_workaround.jpg[/img][/url] cheers! anselm

Hi All this is my first project with Pflow, I have a vein with bloodcells flowing down, the cells are bouncing off a proxy vein assigned to a uDeflect, the problem I have is this On the straight and narrow the particles are flowing ahead of the camera, as they come to a fork in the road there is a bit of a bottle neck and the camera over runs the Pflow and then the Pflow catches up again on a straight run, How can i keep the flow going nicely down each route, I was thinking of speed by icon but I have 6 stems branching off so I thought that might be case of over kill, I have uploaded a Max preview render at www.rendermedia.co.uk/download/misc/vein.avi the way I have the scene set up is quite efficient however its just the lag thats proving to be a bit of a problem. cheers Mark [url=http://upload4.postimage.org/1262504/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload4.postimage.org/1262504/pflow_setup.jpg[/img][/url]

just wondering if it would be possible to generate a wetmap like in realflow with p-flow tools?

Hy community! The company i work at the moment just swiched to VRay 1.5. So far so good... After a few days of getting familiar with the new features i figured out a serious issue (or maybe did something wrong?): When i use either a static or dynamic material to shade the particles everything looks good in the viewport and renders just as expected and i´m used to with scnaliner. Same goes for older VRay versions (only tested 1.47.x). But VRay 1.5 seems to have issues recognizing wich materialID every particle has and along that wich material has to be assigned. I already tried to wrap a MESHER compound object around the particle system then i converted it to an edit poly and from then into a vray proxy mesh object. finally i assigned the multi/sub material and thanks god the vray proxy dealed right with the materialIDs... that´s, let my cut that short a shitty workaround that works but spends some major time!!! i attached an image explaining the issue a little more visual: [img]http://core2core.de/spielwiese/pflow-vray-material-issue.jpg[/img] Hopefully anyoe can help out :( regards and thanks in advance anselm

Hello, 3Dsmax7, German Version - so i have to guess the name of the operators I have an PFlow system which follow an Symbol. I want to orientate the Partikles along theirs direction AND spin on theirs local y axis. [url=http://upload4.postimage.org/1181938/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload4.postimage.org/1181938/OrientationAndSpin.jpg[/img][/url] Thanks a lot and sorry for my bad english, oli

I know you can control the speed of the particles and a few other things using the material-based coloring, but I could not find a way to control the scale of the particle using a grayscale map. Is that possible? Suppose I have a plane mapped with a checker. I want the particles being emmited from the black areas to be smaller in size from those being emitted from the white areas. Thank you for your help, HEMOglobina

I hope that I can explain this properly. I am trying to treat a bunch of pre-positioned mesh objects in my scene as particles. Basically, I have a scene of a city block and I have broken this city scene into thousands of mesh elements. What I want to do is create a particle flow event where a particle gets spawned and each individual particle is then attached to the center of each on of these city mesh elements (each mesh element is then linked to the particle). I then want to do some nifty things in PFlow to blow around the city scene to dissamble it in a very creative way. Does this make sense and is it possible. Thanks Paul

Hi every body i'm working in a complex project (to me). I have to form a bird with particles like water while the bird is flying. i think Lock/Bond operator could works to do this but i have an issue with it. The problem is that when i press f9 to make a render, the particles that obei to the Lock/Bond operator does not appear in it. But instead it appear in the viewport preview. What can i do to figure it out? and why this could happen? thanks , and i hope to find any help in this forum.

Hi all, it's me again :) I am now working on a space battle scene, with a lot of PFlow stuff - the weapons, small fighters, effects, all PF. There is a situation, in which a swarm of fighters is flying near a big starship, which fires a storm of lasers at them. I can't figure out a way to guide the laser particles to the fighter particles. The best I came up with is an area effect - using Speed By Icon for the fighters, and linking a Find Target icon to the speed icon. This makes the lasers shoot at the same area, and some random fighters are passed to an explode event. So this is an area effect, and not giving real collisions between particles. And maybe I could get away with it, but I am sure that there is a better way of doing it. Maybe a script, or something in the famed box #3 :) Thanks ;) P.S.: This is my first fully rendered PFlow animation: [url]http://cravenous.com/fworks.avi[/url] - fireworks, of course :) It turned out rather good, and I am having great time with PFlow! Thanks, Mr. Bayborodin!

Hi people, I really like the 'lines' option in the Display operator (the one that displays particles as vectors, essentially. Line is alligned to particle speed, and size corresponds to particle speed). But is there any way to get this result in a render? Thanks a lot, Hristo

hi, how can i get real rain effect...im using 3ds max, is there any possible to get in max particles joseph

Hi I have a crowd scene made with pflow. 10000 soldiers looking at the same target. Each one have spear pointing at the other target with a little random orientation. I'd like to have little bit random movement to those spears. Just +- 15 degrees to random axis. Movement should be also uniq for every spear. So how can i do that? I'm using shape instance for spears. Group including 3 variations. Of cource i could give them noise rotation controller and use animated shape option in pflow, but it's way too heavy. Any ideas? Thank you. -LarsSon

hello everybody, i wrote a script that enables me to have 1 particle emmiting from the pivot point of objects, it is working, but i have a little problem. there are also particles emmitting from the emmiter and i do not want that, do you know what ishould add in my script to get rid of them? or what should i do so tat they are not here? here is the max file. any help would be apreciated, thank you http://www.richardadenot.com/stuff/file.zip

From the Box One Help File: Re Initial State and Selections Selection – Takes particle selection data. Any selections in the Initial State operator’s particle system will be overwritten by the snapshot selection. this works with regular birth but not with a birth script Note if the Snapshotted PF Source has a Group Select;Split Group in the flow; the initial state will not honour these selections for some reason!?

I have a flow that has paper on the ground. As a collision moves over the top they drop into the next flow that sends them to start thier animation where it looks like wind is blowing on them and they are stuck eventually after 30frames they are freed. I have an age test for that event that checks28 var2 and spits to the next event that should continue the animation. What I'm finding is in the last event they all jump to the current state of the animation, it doesn't look too bad but it certainly isn't right :(. Is this something I need to script? and if so could anyone send me in the right direction? Thank you.

Where did these come from, i got them from the wall breakapart tutorial, but dont see them any where on the site. whats up with these, and are they production ready thx

Hi all! I was wondering if anyone has any clues on how to use the Mapping Object* Operator and then change the color of the particles to a different color than the one emited. What I'm trying to do, is to have the particles emiting from a colorful object and then a few frames later get the particles to change to another color. Any ideas? Thanks in advance. Carlos

Hi, I wrote an exporter plugin for 3ds Max that exports all parameters in the paramblocks of the particle flow actions. Now im trying to export them with animation support. But it seems that Particle flow does not use Keyframe Controllers so the only way to export the data is to sample it in certain time intervals for every parameter. Is this right or am I overlooking something? Is there any other way to export animated parameters besides using GetValue() every frame? regards TKiefer

hi all i need to have particles coming off emitters which are within a contained space ...ie a bus. The bus is moving and there is also a camera move. now i want the particles to inherit the motion of the bus but on a frame by frame basis..imagine a pressurised cabin. so that the particle system is in effect not moving globaly with reference to the world but in its own local environment (the bus) which has no speed. I hope this makes sense. I've tried using the inherit motion from position object, but can't work out a way to get this working. any help would be great, sorry if it is just me being dumb! cheers paul

Hello all, ok so I have flow that emits particles over the surface of an object for 1 frame, they are attached to the surface, and they spawn parts over time. the emmiter (hands) move about quite a bit, but during very fast, large movement the system falls apart (visualy) basicly I want to delete the spawned particles when they get too far from the emmiter, . any ideas? as always box 1 or 3 solutions welcome thx

Hi all, this is probably something straight forward, but I havent been able to figure it out. I would like to have two or more PFlow setups to interact, for exemple when the particles from diferent flows touch, they trigger a new action. Is this possible? Thanks in advance.

Hello, over 100 frames I have 10 particles spawn, so every 10 frames a particle is birthed. is thier a way to have a slight varience on this, so a part would be birthed on say frame 8, 21, 29,38, and so on. Box 1 or 3 solutions welcome, I would rather not script, but I have to I will. thx

I have a simple problem. I want my particle system to follow a spline with a beginning and an end.. I have looked everywhere for a solution, and all I learn is that "Speed by Icon" is somehow involved in this.. yet then it only follows the emitter-icon.. and theres no way to select the spline I made.. What can you wise men tell me that I have overlooked?

Is it possible to make a mesh-object out of a particle flow at a certain point in time? After some frames have passed my particle flow looks like a tree-like structure which I'd like to use as an object, not an animated particle system.

Hi all! Something really freaky has happened to one of the files I havent open for a while, I cant get the particles to be displaied on the viewport, altho I have a Display on the render Event, also tried to add the display to all the events and still nothing. It renders fine though. Also tried to open another max scene with a PFlow setup, it shows fine, but when I merge the ofending scene into this scene all particles disapear..is that weird or what? Thanks in advance. PS: I'm using afterburn too, if it may help.

Hello, I wonder if there is a way to reduce the size of dots when you display your particles in such a way with Particle Flow. It doesn't seem to be linked with the size of vertices in the configuration pannel... Can you help ? Thanks.

Hey all, I have an effect where I am turning text into dust via a deflector and some wind forces etc so the text is blown away, what I want to do is have the particles from the text that are blown to the right start to form text from the ground up... so basically text blows from the top, the particles blow to the right and start to form a word until all the particles blown from the right form a word, then that word is blown to the right (from the top down) and forms another word from the bottom up. I was trying to do this using lock / bond and find target and all sorts of things but I can't seem to get the next word to form in any sort of decent fashion at all. Can someone help me with some suggestions on what to try with this. Thanks all.

hi all ok i am using the mapping object from box1 which is great. The problem i have is that i am using an image sequence (quicktime movie) as the texture and the colours the particles pick up change over time as the image sequence changes...i need to freeze the colour picked up at birth. i can think of one way but its a pain in the arse. this is to have a material for each frame of the image sequence and then a script which allocates the relevent material according to the particles birth frame. I don't even know if this can be scripted. Anyhow there must be an easier way as i am dealing with 5 second sequances and 30 of them! cheers paul

Hello, I keep getting the following error when using the lock bond op with a specific piece of geometry, its a edit mesh with 3000 faces. a window pops up with the header, Birth texture op warning and the message, Turn On the Geometry Safe Mode. this keeps poping up 10 15 times then crashes max. I have tried welding verts, resting x forms, but all to no avail. I also tried a fresh file and diff flows with the same geometry, with the same results. any ideas thier is also a u deflector with the same mesh applied for this error to occur.

Hey all, I was wondering if there is a relatively painless way to create a particle system that will generate pages in a book and allow me to flip through them is someone were reading through it? I plan on hand animating the cover of the book, as well as the first page. What I'm hoping to do is create a system that will take what i've done on the first page and replicate it hundreds of times. I also need to be able to vary the speed at which the pages flip. Any light that anyone can shed on the subject would be greatly appreciated. thanks -brandon

Is there a way to use displacement, say a world space noise and have all the particles respect the displacement. For instance. If I want to have grass blowing in the wind and I want to deform the instanced geo I coutl use a mix map with a gragient to contropl the amount of displacement along the blade and then have a nouse in world space that rolls across the landscape. As far as I can tell rendertime dispalcement is not possible with PFlow. And The displace mod will work just fine except that when you instance the base mesh for the particle it uses the instance for the corodinates not for each particle. This means that all the particles are uniform in their motion. Any thoughts? Cant get mesher to work with it either. Thanks -Michael

Hi, i have stuck in using blob mesh. i use a path like helix.In PF with speed by icon particles move nicely on the path.when i pick in blob pf blob surface not render .i want to show that liquid flows from the tube.what should i do to make this effect from PF ? Thanking u. Alpa. :lol:

Hi, can i have noisey movement in PF . particles emmits from icon ? How? i have another prob in collision. A cylinder is pick as position object and as in udeflector as deflector. From some frame particles nicely move inside the cylinder but after 400-500 frame 1 or 2 paticle go outside. why it happens ? Thanking u, Alpa : lol:

hello ! i want to create the following system inside a specific volume: i have a box and an emitter inside. my goal is to let the particles flow on the "ground" (speed by surface) and as soon as they collide with a wall let them be driven (wind1) to the ceiling where they then (as soon as collided) drive along the surface again ... ... as soon they collide with a "wall" (side of box) they should then be driven (wind2) back to the floor again where they continue flowing along the surface ! this should be endless loopable and absolutely interactive (no matter where emitters placed, orientation, number of emitters) best would be if even the collidiing particles from 2+ emitters behave as soon as collided ! thank you very much for your help and sry - i know i am "indeed" new to max (r6) indeed

I would like to bake my pflow using snapshot, or cache, but neither work, and only info I could find out about it was posted a few years ago. Any method revised for diong this in max 8? thanks

There is a small problem in my scene and I wonder if I'm alone with this: I have a scene file with 4 PF sources. 2 are currently deactivated but they should get activated once I get to the final rendering. The last 2 were merged from a different scene. After adjusting some animation curves I tried to add some additional operators. But it seems I must have locked one of the particle systems: I can't move several events in the Particle View nor can I move/copy the operators within these events. How did I accidentally lock an event? Or this there something wrong? Sorry for sounding noob, but I feel rather stuck here. T.I.A. ky

So, Im making a bit of bubblemotion by instancing a sphere with an offsetted pivot. So when i spin the particles the instances move in a bubbly sort of way... No problem there. BUT when i want to add Afterburn to my bubbles the afterburn puffs are at the the position och the particle and NOT in the position of the instanced object.... I know WHY this happens but is there anyway around this? thanks /Arvid

Hi In preset flow i want to save such pf which i made for my chemistry team.How can i transfer my pf to perset flow. plese tell me is it possible ?How? Thanking u. Alpa :lol:

I was curious is whether the double-sided material is compatible with the mapping object? When I use a global mapping object (pointing to a 4:3 object with mapping) , followed by a global materialstatic pointing to d.s material AND I use a 25 particle birth script [representing a 4:3 box](with no mapping) AND I use a go-to-rotataion to rotate the particles to the other side of the screen; the mapping gets confused on the Z axis and will flip on some of the frames in the transition. I can supply a scene if required...

Hi, i have assemble dessemble problem. cylinder01 is as position object.particles should assemble on this top to bottom.in event 02 find target. event 03 another position object in which i pick cylinder02. now particle should dessemble on this in bottom to top. Is it possible ? How Thanking u. Alpa. :cry:

Hello everyone! I've been trying to make good smokey puffs with max, pflow and afterburn. I havent been playing with particles very long so controlling the movement of particles has been hard for me. Here is video what i'm trying to do http://dante.daug.net/3d/smoke.mov Basically smokes speed is fast at beginning and then it slows down. I've been trying to do this for some time now but i havent got any realistic results so far. Any ideas, tutorials, example scenes or anything are gonna be helpful. Thanks and nice forum you got here :)

Hello, I want to create a system where scale of particle is determined by distance from the center of emmiter, or even better, center of the volume. Im sure this is easily done wit box3, but until thier is floating liscence that is not an option (yur killing me Oleg, heh) Any ideas? thx

Hi, i have problem to render my files. When i use 3 or 4 flows in same file problems starts. particles are during 400 to 500 frames but file is 1400 t0 2000 frams. each flow has 500 to 600 particles. cache goes run out of memory. 1 frame take 30 minites. what should i do to increase the speed of render. Thanking u, Alpa :cry:

Hi there i want to do an animation along a Spline Curve with Pflow. The special think about it is that the particles should follow the spline(translation and rotation) exaktly at any time. My solution with a Speed By Icon works fine for near particles but the particles which spawn later in Time just take the direction and position of the Speed By Icon Helper Obj when they are not at the right position of the Path. Hopefully you understand my Problem (it's a little bit difficult to discribe) and got a helpfull Hand for me Kind Regards P.S. excuse my bad english :)

Hi, i have problem in using collision.i have taken a sphere01 as a position object and in Udeflector as a object.my particles moving inside sphere01 very nicely.Now i placed one more sphere (sphere02) inside the sphere01. i put sdeflector arround the sphere02. in first collision test i pick Udeflactor and second collision test pick Sdeflactor.but my paticles not take collision with Sdeflector and go in the sphere 02. How can i do this ? Thanking u. alpa. :)

Hi Guys, I did a search to see if anyone else had posted about this, but nothing so here goes! Im trying to make a nuclear explosion, with mushroom cloud, but im not gettingvery far. Ill post my scene soon, but had anyone got any pointers to help me out? Thanks

Hello, I have a Render Problem when just simply animating the teapot of the great "Inherit Texel Color From Emitter" Tutorial from Bobo (The Lock/Bond being activated). I'm not really into MaxScript so is there just a simple way to avoid this problem ? Thanks a lot :wink:

Hi, I was using a combination of scatter and pointcache2 to render large crowds of people who are seated in a stadium. Making sure I turn off distubution object and a few tweaks I could avoid crashes and render 40,000 people easy, all with offset animation. to get the randomness of position I made a tri for each seat then used a script to randomise selected faces and detach them for each variation of character - slightly tedious I thought I would have a go at using pflow for the same task as it is quick to use groups of characters. easyer to set up. I got about 5000 characters - about 360 to 600 poly each (can't remember exact). Although the memory use seems to float between 500 and 900megs , I left it going and it crashed at frame 40. (I have 2gig mem , running win2k - max8) To make the particles face the right way I use direction to target the icon in reverse so they all point inwards I have them emmit on frame 0 to 0 I keep them stuck in place using position on object I think, so they don't move, just face the icon - direction by speed. Is there any way I could optomise this to use less memory and have less chance of crashing? Is it going to be possible to render 40k crowds without buying box1 ? As the particles need to totally stop and not update other than playing the offset animations, is there any way I can improve the update time?! thanks for any advice, I may go back to using scatter, because although its a pain to set up, it does not crash mid way through renders...

Hello, Im trying to emit one particle per vertice, i red about the fix so i downloaded the ParticleActionPlus and added it. But i still get 5 particles if i set the emitter to 10. I'm breaking my head over this. Am i completely wrong or is there something else i need to do ? Thanks in advance [url=http://upload3.postimage.org/33465/photo_hosting.html][img]http://upload3.postimage.org/33465/PositionObject.jpg[/img][/url]

Hi all, I have a animated chracter that i "filled" with particles, using first a position object operator, volume location, then I'm using the Lock/Bond operator so I can keep the particles on the character volume and not just on its surface when in motion. Altho when I apply the Lock/Bond, most of the particles stick to they position, some of them jump out of the character like he's got some niddles stuck on his body. Any ideas why this is happening? Thanks in advance. Carlos

Hi guys! I`m new here so hello to You all :) I`ve got this problem which is quite strange for me and I have no bloody idea how to solve it. Well I have rigged object (object attached to the bones using skin modifier) and I have cloud of particles which is not moving at all. Object is also connected with UDeflector and using collision test with the flow. The problem is that when I`m moving bones (so that the object ought to interact with the particles) nothing is happening. But when I move the object (not touching the bones) or if the particles have fairly high speed the collision takes place. I`ve used Xform for the object and still nothing. It doesn`t matters if it`s complex mesh or simple cylinder. It is also important to have the whole system the way I`ve presented (particles which are not moving at all and object animated by bones). I know that not only I have this kind of problem so the answer would be appriciated not only by me. best regards Leru

Hi guys, I need to have a rock, with some smaller broken off parts fall down a mountain, and land on a road, scattering a little, maybe denting the road. Is this possible through pflow or is it more of a reactor job?

Is there a way to get Pflow to intergrate with the hair&fur dynamics. Mesher's not working. I know how to script objects to follow the Pflow movement but is there any another way? thanks! Arvid

hi all, Im new to the forum, and PFlow! Im trying to make a loop of bubble particles, about 2 seconds in length, starting with nothing, filling a volume, and then looping, and clearing. Any ideas, thanks. Mark

Why are all properties inherited from event to event except material? Khye

Hey, I'm trying to get a pflow system to collide particles based on their mesh and not out their center point...is that possible...cuz i can't seem to find "the button" what i've got is a system that emits...the particles fall...bounce 5 times...then stop on the ground... what i'd like to have happen is the particles fall...bounce 5 times (is there a way to add variation to that)...then come to rest on the ground with minor secondary motion...like rocking back and forth or a slight skid...using the mesh as the collision point instead of the pivot point... any help would be greatly appreciated... thanks -brandon

Hi all, I'm gonna start on a project where I have to animate a whole bunch of rose petals using PFlow. The problem is that when they colide with each other or the environment, they do so using the pivot point. I wonder if theres a way to use the instanced mesh as the volume for colision, just like in a Reactor/Simcloth simulation. Does anyone know a way around this? Any script available? Would PFlow Tools 3 address this issue? Help very much apreciated. Many thanks! Carlos

simple sphere is emitting low number of particles with spawn by travel test and drag force. the result is something like ''spikes'' growning at the surface of sphere. after animation of rotation or position of sphere, the spikes are moving out from their original position into the local cordinate system of sphere object. the idia is to lock the movening of particles in local space of sphere. It means that all secondary position and rotation animation of sphere object must NOT affect the movening of spikes and there must be locked in local space of sphere and sphere's normals ;) the idealized variant of this try must work at any type of surface , for examle surface like character skin. i understand that at each moment of time particles must check the position of sphere and correct self position . something like cycled flow . but i cant solve :)

hi i have a problem in PF and needed help. i have 4 pf in my file and 3 of them are updated and cache.but the 4th pf is giving me a problem when updating and spoils the PF.so plz can some one tell me what is it that i'm doing wrong. WILLIAM[/quote][/list][/list]

Skip my introduction to the bottom of this post to read my question ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pardon for any bad spelling. I just started looking for a particle forum and found this nice community. I am not at my my station at the moment so sorry for the lack of visuals about my problem. I haven't done any looking much about this effect but I will when I return home and have time. Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction I have used particle flow to some extent and understand the basic principles but lack applying it in creative manners. Thats where you guys help please. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Question I would like to create 3d text that is covered in a blob like shinny liquid. The shiny liquid will goop off the letters to show very pretty chormed letters. Help visualizing my goal This may help to get an idea of what I mean. Think about if you had dipped a candy apple in molasses and then the liquid just dropped off to show the apple completely clean. I should be back to display pictures and research my findings.

Is trying to make a caramel rain that falls and forms "the form" of a logo, I make it with pflow and has left enough good, now I have a pair of faltantes. 1. The caramels do not interactuan, are not struck to each other. 2. Not teng very in clear like putting but of 1 object (what I do is to group three caramels and ready) volume that group like particle, but not if he is the correct thing. 3. The caramels beat in the ground and they do not bounce anything, and if use bounce of pflow, goes away upwards it is to say bounce but very much. Good if somebody knows it clearly with this or knows of some good tutorial it would thank for aids (I thought that with pflow and reactor it is possible to be obtained, but not like hooking pflow with rigid body of reactor). The idea is that they fall three caramel models as rain and are in the floor, but that "they rebonten" something and they interactuen "something" a greeting Sorry for my English From Argentina

Hello I was wondering if it's possible to use an animated bitmap as a Density Map in Plow 'coz until now I just can't make it work... When I plug an bitmap in the density slot, it works fine but when I plug the same texture but with a animated bitmap, particle just disappear... Any idea :idea: ?? Thanks a lot for your help...

First, a little bit about the terminology - explosive spawning here does not mean spawning for explosions. It's more about the spawning that has exponential amount curve - say, each particle spawns three new particles per frame. As a result, they multiply rather quickly: 1 frame: 1 particle 2 frame: 1 + 3 = 4 particles 3 frame: 4 + 4*3 = 16 particles 4 frame: 16 + 16*3 = 64 particles 5 frame: 64 + 64*3 = 256 particles 6 frame: 256 + 256*3 = 1,024 particles 7 frame: 1,024 + 1,024*3 = 4,096 particles 8 frame: 4,096 + 4,096*3 = 16,384 particles 9 frame: 16,384 + 16,384*3 = 65,536 particles 10 frame: 65,536 + 65,536*3 = 262,144 particles 11 frame: 262,144 + 262,144*3 = 1,048,576 particles So, in just 10 frames the number of particles exceeds the default particle amount limit (100,000), and in 11 frames it exceeds 1 million. It would not be so bad but... If there is a Shape operator then the spawning process forces the system to copy the mesh information in-between particles. And mesh data is HEAVY. Therefore significant slowdown may occur. The only work-around that I have found is to use Box#3 in a specific manner. Namely, use Cache Disk operator to record the spawning with the Shape operator disabled. The Cache Disk operator allows to use PFlow operators on post-cache basis, so the Cache operator can be plugged in as a post-cache operator. This is much faster because in this case the mesh data is shared between particles, and no copyind of mesh data occurs. Thanks, Oleg B.

Someone please help! i am having problems when using vray (1.47) motion blur. In that it wont work if the topology changes during the motion blur duration period, for the event with the display operator. Which it normally does in most situations when particles are still being born. I know vray 1.5 has true motion blur for particles, but i dont have it! SO............ I am tring to write a script that will offset the particle creation but have them hidden (or transparent, or infinitly small) but they act in the same way during the rest of the events. basically so they are all created at the same time, but can then be controlled by normal operators. and it all has to be done in a single event!!! any help out there? many thanks

Hi All How can I control the spin rate of my particles, based on there speed? I have collision spawn, which then moves to a collision. Based on their min speed they are then past on to the next event, where the spin rate is set to zero. But while the particles are slowing down, their spin rate keeps moving at the same speed, which then stops all at once. P.S I am working within MAx 8, so I can't install the freebies :-/ Hope that makes sense? Thank you in advance. :roll:

Hi, I've been asked to add functionality to our generic max data exporter (an sdk based plugin for max 7) to support particle systems, specifically Particle Flow based systems. I'm looking to extract data on particle ids, position, orientation, scale, materials, colour/alpha values, and "activeness" for each frame. Now I'm pretty sure this should be dead easy, and I think my problems may be down to my limited knowledge of max plugin development in general, but I can't work out how to do this. Is there any kind of detailed documentation on pulling out these basic values that someone could point me to? I have a list of scene objects/inodes stored for valid objects which I've tried to get particle interfaces from with little success. I'm not even sure which objects I should be adding to my list of valid class id's to be trying to extract information from. Apologies in advance for this, as I have the feeling I'm asking some very silly questions here, but any help would be greatly appreciated. It's driving me nuts! Thanks! Andy

Hi. I have a request to have particles move from one letter to another letter in a persons logo. I used the technique I tried to explain in the exploding character but I can seem to get the shape of the target instance smooth enough as there are thousands of particles. So basically I have an M which over time disperses has a windy sort of effect then will jump to an E and so on. Can anyone give me some tips on this please. S.

Hi. Is it possible to make Material Dynamic operator NOT to reassign material IDs to particles, if any of particles are deleted later with Delete operator by their age? Material Static works exactly this way, it doesnt reassign IDs every time, when any of particles are being deleted, but with Static its impossible to use Particle Age map (or maybe i've missed something). I need to use Particle Age for opacity, and also have 10 submaterials assigned randomly, but materials should be assigned on birth and kept during whole particle's life. Thanx. :roll:

Hey, I have a simple question but the answer I cannot get right. I am making a small UFO craft that has a jetsons type engine. I have particles emitting for 500 frames but they only have a life of 15. I am using a shape instance of a torus and what I want it to do is scale up for the life of the particle from 100% to 180%, the torus gets bigger as it nears the end of its life.. I want this scale to only work like this for the 15 frame age of the exhaust. so basically I need torus's to grow to 180 of there original size over their life. I can't seem to get my scale settings correct. Can anyone help me with this please? S.

Hi All, I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on this example that I would like to create using PFlow. Basically I have a character that needs to break apart into pieces and possible come back together. The mesh itself is already modeled into pieces, meaning it is a series of indivuadal pieces of geomotry. I would like to use the actually geomotry as its particles or at least make it look that way. The character will be doing some sort of action, running, jumping etc then striking a ball. When the character strikes the ball he will break apart. Think of a chain reaction, starting when the character kicks a ball...from the shoe to shin, to thigh all the way up. While I am a experience in 3d ( maya and max ) I have not done that much production work with pflow in 3ds max, I know the basics of it. I should mention that the animation is being done character studio using mocap data in 3ds max 7. Any ideas of a starting point would be great. Also any reference sites and your tutorials that deal with issues like this would also be greatly appriciated. BTW I have ordered a few of Allan dvds from cg-academ to learn from but they have not arrived yet. Thank you for your help. Regards Alex

Hi all ... i am wondering if anyone else has experienced a similar problem with Afterburn and PFLOW as i am having. i have a system where i send my particles to a next event with the AGE test i tell ABurn to receive particle orientation from PFLOW (a tick in the orientation box in AB operator in PFLOW)... ticked in both events . it seems there is a bug in the conectivity somewhere?? ABurn doesnt hold the orientation thru the swap to the new event and the AB volume jump rotates .. result is a big nasty flash pop in my render of nice slowly moving pyroclastics. Oleg or other gurus ?? do you know of this issue? .. i have searched for other similar probs elsewhere but turned up empty.

Hey all, I'm wondering what would be the best way to go about deleting a volume of particles within a volume of particles. What I've got is a pflow emitting with a volume but i need to hollow out the center of the volume, make a spherical void right in the center. Most of the stuff i've done to achieve this really slow down the system: for instance, i tried having them emit from the surface of a sphere and then stopping after a time...but between the speed and the age test and the second speed it was taking 5-10 times longer to calculate...which slows everything down...and slow is bad ;) any help would be really appreciated...thanks so much -brandon

hi i'm trying to animate a bunch of fish swimming around. i created a fish and animated its movement. but how do i make it bend as its following the path i setup up for my particles??? could you point me out in the right direction please?

Not sure if i'm being dumb or if this is possible. I want to use instanced animated geometry from one particle source as collision objects for another particle source. Basically I have bunches of hair/tentacles moving around that have to interact with a load of balls. It is a visualisation of inside the ear and how the otoliths work. Is it possible to achieve this with pFlow or do I need to use just standard geometry/udeflectors outside of a pFlow source?

How is pflow handling multipass motionblur? Does it do a full reevaluation of the system for all the time samples? Or just takes the speed vector on the even frame, and offsets the particles based on that, and the time interval? If i cache the pflow system, and then use multipass motionblur to render, how would this mechnizm work? Reevaluation happens from the last cached even frame till the sample time? (seems like this is the case, just want to make sure) thanks

Hi I have a particle flow system where i want to send particles through a pipe and they shall fill always the whole pipe. The pipe looks like this: ----- \ --------- and has different bores. I thought now of the pipe as a Deflector, but sometimes the particles fly back and this will destroy the illusion of a stream. Thus i tried to apply several Find Targets within the pipe to give a specific way for the particles, but they don´t get always near enough to the targets and thus don´t find their way to the next target. Second problem is also, if i apply also a collission with the pipe as deflector to keep the particles within the pipe, the collission doesn´t get respected. event1: find target --> event2 if close enough collission (the pipe) display1 event2: collission (the pipe) display2 collission is both set to bounce. Already thanks for all ideas/infos Azrael

hi everyone, i have the following problem: i want to use pflow to simulate city traffic, seen from far away. particles (cars) should be allowed to move on a grid, make random turns, but always go in straight lines (otherwise they would hit the buildings) as the "cars" are only lights in my project, their direction is irrelevant i am unable to script, is there any other way to do this can particles be told to move e.g. only along the edges of a plane? thx. chris

A simple problem so i'm sure that this is either a known bug or i'm just stupid! I want to emit particles using the density by material option from a cylinder. This works fine with 2d maps such as chequer or a regular bitmap the problem is when i want to use a 3d procedural such as noise or cellular. The particles do not emit from the correct place. It works fine with planes, boxes and spheres but not with cylinders or teapots. I have set the mapping coordinates to explicit map channel which i think should be correct but it doesn't work properly. I know i could bake out the procedural map as a texture but i need to maintain a procedural workflow as I will be animating maps and using them to drive other things such as shading and displacement. Any help most appreciated.

Hey, I'm trying to position my particles on the vertices of a geosphere...i got that far easily. the part i'm having trouble with is getting the geomtry of the particles to point in the direction of the normals for each vert. Basically i need place ojects at an even distance along the surface of a sphere and have those objects look like they're standing on the surface of the sphere... any suggestions would be appreciated... thanks -brandon

Storing shape (mesh) data in a cache gets very large very fast. I'm hoping that a caching system can be made that impliments data compression. Only a unique shape should be stored. Each particle just needs to know which shapeID to use. I'm just throwing this out there. :) Cheers, Ben.

[img]http://kyphurland.com/img/arrows02.gif[/img] This is probably something simple but I've already searched the forums and couldn't find an answer. What I need is the arrows in the above animation to rotate like arrows would as if being launched from a bow rather than keeping a level flight. I have a look at modifier in PFlow's heirarchy that helps a little with it going towards the target but that's about it. Using Max 6 with PFlow.

Hello all, my first post here, so thankyou in advance for providing both creating p flow, and providing us with a method to discuss. I am having problems with the u deflector and pflow, I have a simple cylinder (about 16 polys) which is linked to the u deflector, and a p flow with about 5000 polys. now the calc takes about 20 mins to ramp up. Turn of the collision no ramp up time. if i build the same cylinder shape out of regular deflectors (14 of them) ramp up takes about 5 mins. This is an ok work around but seems a little silly. is there a simpler way to do simple object deflections. Or maybe a set of simple shape deflectors (like the s deflector) oh yes and when will we be able to purchase tool box 3? I need it yesterday, heh. thx sam

I'm trying to set up a Flow where particles generated on a plane will orbit on a stable path around an object . The closer to the object the faster the particle will orbit. At a specific time the orbits will start to decay and the particles will orbit in ever tighter circles, speeding up as they get closer to the center. To make things even more complicated I'd like to have each particle have more particles that would orbit around it. The final effect would be something like a solar system of planets and their moons collapsing into the sun. If it was only a few objects then linking and animating them by hand would be a simple solution but I'd like to use p-flow to control thousands at a time. We will also be creating multiple animations with varying gravity/speed settings so a procedural system seems the best way to go. I've made some progress on the decaying orbit using a force operator and a vortex space warp but I can't use the same method to create the stable orbits of the first part. I've tried position object to lock the particles onto an animating mesh until transferring them to the decay event but that is not very flexible and the change is very abrupt. Is there a better way to have particles orbit a specific point?

how i can align particle instances ( cilynders ) according to particle velocity ? when you switch display tipe to lines, particles are visible like lines, and their length is as long as quick they are. i want to align my cilinder instances to their speed vectors ^)

Hi there, I'm having problems with PFlow and can't figure out how to achieve this... I have instanced geometry (cylinder) particles emitting from a sphere. Now, I'd like those emitted particles to emit other particles also instanced geometry (box). The problem is, that I can't figure out how to emit those (boxes) from the surface of first particles (cylinders) not only from their pivot point. Better example would be ice crystal forming or tree growing. Do I need to mesh the first particles someway before PFlow understands them as geometry ? If so... any pointers on how to proceed. Best regards, Timo

This is a problem i've had constantly throughout my use of PFlow and i've never really been able to resolve it. Once my PFlow scenes get complex, things start going funky with the render of a scene not correlating to the viewport view of the scene. With my current scene, I have not yet successfully rendered what I actually see in my viewport at all lately. I'm not sure how to fix this, but throwing in Cache's on certain areas and removing them etc. hasn't helped... How can you fix this? It's quite difficult previewing your flows when what you see in the Viewport isn't what comes up in the render...

I was trying to help out a fellow artist who found what might be a bug. He has multiple objects emitting particles in the fasion of fountains. The issue is that when Variation of speed is used in conjuction with Divergence, the fountain heights do not all reach the same level. The greater the amount of either of them , the greater the unevenness. I would have chalked this up to 'just the way it is supposed to work' except that there seems to be a pattern in the unevenness, perhaps related to the order of the objects within max (thier order of creation?)..the first being the shortest, and the last being the tallest. Can onyone shed some light on this? If need be, I can uplaod a scene demonstrating this.

I have a setup of a curved tube that particles follow using an animated icon and a Speed By Icon with offset by particle age. I have another flow coming from 3D space that needs to join this flow (all along different points of the flow) and follow the tube. Think of sprinkling dust in a river, except on every axis. I've tried a find Target--> Mesh and then set the speed by surface parallel, but the particles need the z axis of the face, if that makes sense. Directional. I've also tried a Keep Apart with negative value trying to keep them close to the flow, but they don't inherit the speed of flow 1. Any suggestions? Just wondering if anyone had anything before i started scripting something. Khye

i am trying to set up mBlur in vray. i have no result/ i am turning on ( right click on ''properties'') image Mblur, tHen i turn on vray Mblur in vray camera properties but Nothing works! (DISCRIPtION in this post http://www.orbaz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=144) i cant understand why ;( can anybody help me ? ;)

Hi everybody i tryed everything but i can't get the geometry to hold the particles and not losing them i placed two examples online in *.mov format i also placed the original files online the "blizard szene" is done with the blizard emitter the "pf szene" is done with particle flow (without any keep apart groups) these are two peaces from the end of an 890 frame animation where you can see how particles break throug the wall of the closed tank and even seem to be shoot away in the air (look at bottom of tank) can somebody please tell me what to doo??? because otherwise i would have to retouch like hundred of pictures :( [url]http://www.neuhaus.com/3dmax[/url]

When caching a particle system the memory hog is usually the animated shape operator. How can I cache everything except for the shape operator. The only solution I found was to spawn every particle on every frame, apply the shape, and then delete all with lifespan of 1. This doubles the number of particles. Any advice? Thanks, Ben.

I have a scene with 3200 frames. The particles are age tested to 220 frames and are then passed to a delete. But when I go to the end of the sequence, it takes MUCH longer to do the update then at the beginning of the sequence. There are no Keep Aparts or Spawns or anything that should make for a particle-particle dependancy, so why does it take so long to evaluate? Does Pflow not care that all the particles it is evaluating die anyway long before trhe current frame? As my scene is so long, I can't really cache the particles either. I'm getting killed on the renderfarm. Any ideas on how to make the scene evaluate quicker? - Chad

hi, I was wondering how the influence is affecting the particles... when I try to animate the parameter to something like this: 0%---10,000%---0% 0f--------5f--------9f at frame 9 onwards, the particles are still moving even though the influence is already set to 0%. Same thing happens if I animate the force (wind) spacewarp instead of the influence. I was leaning towards being able to control particle motion using the influence parameter, I was only able to achieve the effect by animating it like this. (0%)---(10,000%)---(-10,000%)---(0%) 0f-----------3f--------------6f----------9f (same thing also happens if i animate the spacewarp itself) I suppose it needs to be balanced, which makes it kinda hard to control on different occasions. I usually place another force operator with a drag in it to controll the way it stops, it works wonderfully. :)

Do you have an approximate release date on the fragmentation operator for PFlow?

I just encountered a strange thing in PFlow. I have actually encountered this a few times in the past, but was unaware until now what was going on. I have a flow of a bunch of particles locked to an animated surface (it is like the Rock character I posted in the User Gallery). I have particles in place and locked to the hands. At certian points in the animation the hands collide with a deflector and the "hand" particles are sent out to a Stop event and piped back into the Lock/Bond event. It works very well. However if at any time I stop a rendering after the intial collision and restart at the nex t consecutive frame, the hands are not always in the same location in the proceeding frames and I get a jump in the final rendering. Also, I set a sequence of frame (ie 451, 505-600...) where frame 451 was mid collision for the hands and 505-600 was after the hands were pulled back away from the deflector. Upon rendering this, frame 451 was correct, but 505-600 rendered with the hand particles detached and still in place from the collision. Basically what I am seeing happening is that on many occasions the particles work fine when rendered in sequence, but in certain flows they do not work if rendered out of sequence. I would assume that this is why some have had problems with network rendering (there was a post on CGTalk). Idealy, the Cache operator should handle this if set to use at render time, however it doesn't always seem to. So, finally (whew...) is this an error with my flow logic or is there perhaps another way to avoid this that I am not seeing? I have had similar problems with slightly complex flows involving Spawning.

Here is my flow: [img]http://helvede.net/temp/pflow_view.jpg[/img] When I preview or render the sequence, atleast a dozen of the particles disappear a little over time. I can see the logic in this if one of the Split events did not have anything connected to them, but they do. Maybe I got the logic of it wrong. In any case, please hit me in the face with a clue. :?

Hi all!!! :D I´m trying to make a donut vortex daemon (like the lightwave one) but not sure how to acomplish the task at all. I´m thinking of using a torus object and make particles that goes trough the main hole, go back traveling along a path dependant to the distance to the iner radious of the torus. I mean, the closer the particle is to the inner radius, the shorter is the path it´s going to take. You know what i mean?. :? What do you think guys? What would you do? Can I use the lock/Bond PFlow event in order to help me? Cheers.

hi people hi oleg I have a problem with pflow. The geometry the particles run through is completly closed. I' m pumping lots of partikles trough and everyting works fine but around 3 % of the partikles pass throug the wall and fly around... :( i'm sending 2 types of particles streams one with speed by icon path follow operator - and the other is just falling with force operator gravity. i include a screenshot of my actual pflow setting.... and there is a link to a little movie showing the problem.... i hope you can help me... because the project-deadline ist tight... tank you very much manuel [img]http://www.neuhaus.com/3dmax/snapshot_pf.gif[/img] [url]http://www.neuhaus.com/3dmax/particles7.avi[/url]

I'm trying to get an object to spin really fast and then slow down over time. I thought I'd be clever and use PFlow with a shape instance, and a spin operator to control the spin speed. But it seems that you can't animate the spin rate. I have keys on it going from 3600 to zero over about three seconds, but the shape never slows down. It the spin operator not meant to animate, or am I doing something wrong? I know about the Stop Gradually operator, and it does a pretty good job, but it would be nice to have more control over the spin rate, like modifying the animation curve and being able to have it slow down, reverse, and then gradually stop.

I'm new to this forum and expect there are some pretty hardcore particle gurus here. Hopefully you can help me solve my issue/lack of expertise. I'm building a clear plastic jar in Max 7.1 for a client that is filled with hundreds of tiny plastic tubes. I've tried Particle Source, Rigid Body/Reactor and Particle Systems with Deflectors to try to simulate the actual product. I'm having two problems: 1. I can't find a method that allows the instanced geometry to pack tightly together, nesting as if poured into the jar to fill all empty spaces. I've tried Keep Apart in Particle Source, I've tired pouring thousands of instances in using Reactor and I've tried a Particle Cloud. 2. All methods allow geometry to break through the deflectors. I've increased the mesh of the container thinking that might help but it seems to have no effect. I can't seem to find any setting that will strengthen the force of the deflectors, specifically (the one I'm currently trying) the UDynaFlect. I'm attaching an image that shows the actual bottle on the left and my current status on the right. [img]http://nvisionanimation.com/guest/ParticleBreakout_01.jpg[/img] The 3D image has a cylindrical mesh with a UDynaFlect attached. A PCloud is used to fill the space. You can see the geometry poking through (which is occurring with every different type of deflector I try) and you can see that there are air gaps or spaces. The geometry instances are packing tightly and using up all available space. I'm also trying 'Use Subtree' which is helping to reduce the clumping but I still get the leaks. Here is a view of that. [img]http://nvisionanimation.com/guest/ParticleBreakout_02.jpg[/img] Any suggestions would be welcomed. I'm doing this for a job and need to resolve it soon. Regards, Rob Holmes

Hi everyone, does anyone know how the following effect could be achieved in particle flow? I am using pflow to simulate a growing flower: the blossom is attached to the pflow emitter, wich is animated along a path. sphere particles emit from the pivot with zero speed, forming a tube with the blossom on top of it. occasionally, additional leaf-like particles are dropped, also with zero speed. so far it works fine, the flower looks nice. now i want the flower to sway gently in the wind. I would like to glue the particles together in the shape they are aligned right now, so I have a more or less stiff chain, that can bend under the influence of e.g. a wind space warp, but not break apart. is anything like this possible in pflow? (I am not exactly a maxscript wizard. I don't know a single spell) thank you for meditating on my problem.

I would like to stop my spinning particles nicely (= ease out). So far, I tried using Go To Rotation, but unfortunately, this operator seems to rotate around arbitrary axis directly towards the target orientation. What I am looking for is a way to restrict that Go To Rotation movement to one axis only. So it will rotate the particle around the x-axis only until it is as close to the target destination as possible. Any ideas/thoughts on how to do this? Thanks! -- MartinB

I must be making something wrong, but I can´t render particles form PFlow with motion blur. Neither Image Mblur nor Object Mblur. Can anyboy please help me? Thanks in advance

I'm wondering if it is possible to setup a system that randomly emits particles from a group of chosen position objects. For exmaple I have 4 seperate faces that I have included in an position object operator and I have setup a noise controller to drive the birth rate. As it stands right now each face is emitting particles at the exact same time based on the rate and I'm trying to find a way to birth them raodomly from the 4 faces. I know I could accomplish this simply by setting 4 different events and using a different seed on my noise controller but maybe there's a way to do it using a script or something. thanks!

To whom it may concern-and perhaps to new users who likewise show up here quite lost... Rendering the nebulae...1)"PF source" w/render seems the most relevant pane...adding the "shape plus"(unique to the Orbaz plug)-finally got me a rendering result...experimented with hearts and texts...noticed they were all coming out with shading exactly the same as the "display dots" parameter in the same pane...since that "display dots" color info seemed to be overriding all of my attempts to add a gradient shader...finally created a camera from the default "perspective" view...in "Particle View" deleted the "display dots" from the "PF Source pane" and replaced it with "Shape Facing 01",which allowed me to program a Blinn to a gradient and start getting some satisfying renders of this nebulae in motion... What took about seven hrs to decipher I am fairly positive could have been explained clearly in two minutes by anyone posting on this site...better to promo friend's training vids I guess-that send me on endless perusals of the abstruse programming-that in no way leads me to the simple rendering question I asked in the first place..would have been nice to have been appreciated and supported as a new customer seeking to learn a bit :roll: .

Having completed Max's tuts on particle flow,having perused numerous times the four vids accompanying the plug at TS,having viewed all of Brandon Davis' training vids on particle flow...I still can render little except the basic Max tuts,and the basic training tuts....I want to get a render of this nebulae...It would be a fan in my sail for learning these complex particle trees...where and what do I insert in the operators that will allow me to get some sort of render of this nebulae...I keep seeing demos of wonderful abstractions that show obvious prowess in managing these particle flows and manipulating them to do complex events in animations...When first I entered max I studied rendering,setting up lights and basic scenes,long before I delved my mat pane deeply...This will become rewarding and worth study the first I can get a tex and render of this nebulae...As an artist,rendering results are what motivate me to penetrate deeper levels of the digital crafts..Please give me some attention on rendering concepts to these particles.

Oleg- No doubt you’ve been asked this a dozen times but here I go anyway. Is there a way to emit particles from an arbitrary spline without converting it to a mesh? And from a purely technical curiosity standpoint, if it isn’t possible currently, is there a problem with doing so on the dev side? As always have a lot of fun with the tools. We are currently working on another feature with lots of Pflow. Sin City which comes out Fri had a ton of stuff as well. Lots of snow! And some blood. Thanks! -Michael Michael Spaw Lead TD @ the orphanage spaw@theorphanage.com

This may already have been covered by a "Get Toolbox 1 answer" but I'd like to give it a shot anyway. :roll: [img]http://helvede.net/temp/browneyefly.jpg[/img] In the example below, I'm using this image as the diffuse mapping in channel 2 and a bitmap mask in mapping channel 1. Channel 2 uses a Mapping operator in PFlow while channel 1 uses the UVW map from the instanced geometry used in the system. All seems to work fine, until the system reaches the Split operator. Then the mapping seems to slide.. Do I have to purchase the Toolbox, or can this be worked around somehow? This is a downsized version of larger scale scene with a similar effect. In the other scene I used a modified bobo Birth script to instance the geometry from existing objects (30.000+) which was pretty heavy.. So I'd very much appreciate it if that could be avoided. Quicktime example: 900kb [url]http://helvede.net/temp/fly_disperse.mov[/url] Zipped max file: 57kb [url]http://helvede.net/temp/fly_disperse.zip[/url]

I'm doing some tests where my particle system is using instanced geometry, and these pieces are falling onto a box object. Now because the particle is still being treated as a simple vertice with a piece of instanced geometry around it, when it hits the plane the instanced geometry goes through the box object until the vertice comes into contact with the box's surface. Is there anyway to treat a particle as a true piece of geometry so that when it collides with another object it is using the instanced geometry as a collision point and not the vertice? thanks!

I found on the web a pretty good explanation of the Cartesian and polar coordinates, and the terms [i]pitch, roll[/i] and [i]yaw[/i], and the [i]Euler angles[/i]. The original link is here: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/56443.html. To guard against broken links, the info is also copied in the message below. Another good article about coordinate systems and conversion between coordinate systems can be found here: http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Polar_coordinate_system#Spherical_coordinates Thanks, Oleg B.

Setup: Speed by icon operator, icon with path constaint. Stop gradually operator. Problem: particles stop correctly but there is no gradual about it. When I have a normal speed operator it works fine. Putting a speed operator right after the speed by icon doesn't fix it. PS: Drag Force doesn't have the desired effect, either. --edit: as a workaround for now I've animated the speed variation min an d max values from 100% - 0% in the speed by icon for the duration to slowdown the particles along the path. Khye

I can delete the pflow helper and there is no Particle object visible in the selection dialog, but when I want to merge from this scene all the events are listed in the dialog. When I create a new Pflow all the old events are in the particle view. How to get rid of them? Michael

Since pflow runs under max's interface, it can get nailed by the dreaded "file bloat", so every once in a while I go through the procedure to get rid of exponential file sizes per save: Open XREF Object Hit Close open XREF Scene Hit Close type GC() from the mini listener I actually type GC() twice to be safe... My PF Scene dropped from 33 M to 11M, after I re-saved it and reloaded it!!!!! (and clicked on file properties) Just FYI 8)

I'm using PFlow to set up an army marching over hilly terrain. It's working pretty good so far, but there are a couple of issues with it that I would like help on, if possible. Here's the basic setup: Particles using a mesh object for position, Speed by Surface using the parallel option to keep them following the ground, a wind modifier with negative force to get them moving forward, rotation using speed space, and shape instance for the soldiers with offset animation. Issue 1: Eventually, some particles (or soldiers) will start going into the ground or rising above it instead of staying on the surface. I'm guessing that using Lock/Bond would help with that, but I don't have the PFlow Tools. It's possible I can talk the company into purchasing it, but for right now is there another way to handle this? Issue 2: There are some creatures in the army that behave more like bugs than people, so I want them to follow the face normals as they move over the terrain, instead of staying upright the whole time. So basically I would like to be able to use Speed by Surface using both the parallel and normals options at the same time. Is there any way to do this? Here's a link to the Max 7 file, minus the actual soldier geometry for contractual reasons. But you still see what's going on with the tetra shapes it's using instead. [url]http://jhaywood.com/ftp/crowdPflow_test.zip[/url]

Hey, Two requests for help in a week, i apologize, but between client changes and deadlines I don't have any time to learn and trouble shoot this stuff...so i look to you for help. One of the events in my pflow system is a find target and collide. When the particles collide they should stop/stick to the object...and most do (so i know i have it set up partially right anyway), but the others don't. Is there something i'm missing, like a tolerance setting or something else? Any suggestions y'all might have would be greatly appreciated. thanks -brandon

Hello everyone.. Rendering snowfall.. maybe it sounds trivial but I really need a help with it.. I have to start making few huge landscapes with a heavy snowfall.. also some with rain and some with falling ashes.. All of them with very intence movement of various vehicles, especially in the air, affecting particles.. Is there any way to render such stuff with proper quality in max..? Which renderer is able to produce the best output..? I worry the most about motion blur.. I really don't want to deal with PRenderman.. :=) I would appriciate any advice and tips.. Thank you in advance and cheers, Paul.

hi i would like to have my particles attach themselves to a model by using a greyscale map, so in my find target i could set it up so that particles are attracted to the whites first, then the greys and finally black is ther a way to script this? or another way to do it? thx |jason

Hey all, I've never been asked to do this before and i didn't think it would be a big deal...till i tried to do it. I'd like to make my pflow particles non-visible to camera. I assumed that i could go to properties and uncheck the box like i usually do...i was WRONG. I need to not see the particles but stilll be able to see the effects of the particles in the scene...ie: shadows and such. If anyone has any info, or knows which button to push i'd be very appreciative. thanks -brandon

For all you paritcle buffs... Quoting MaxPlugins.de [i]"This is an improved version of the standard max particle systems SuperSpray, Blizzard and PArray. The main differences are that the extended versions fix problems with sub-frame particle generation and sampling, and add the ability to inversely rotate facing particles."[/i] Here is the link to the info page http://maxplugins.de/max6.php Here is the link to the file http://www.maxplugins.de/r6_files/kotenpa/ex_particle110.zip

Hey everybody. My first post here, so I thought I'd make it a good one; one that lots of people have problems with (or so I've heard). Anyway, how would the Pflow be set up in order to create a realistic splash where an object hits a water surface? I'm not refering to wakes though. Also, what about having particles roll off an object like the one Brandon Davis' did with his Intermedia logo project? Thanks in advance.

Hi guys I'm new to the forum I'm trying to figure out a way to control parameters within the collision spawn test by the angle at which the parent particle hit the surface the effect i need this for is blobs of paint hitting a wall and floor... when they hit the wall full-frontal they're supposed to explode in all directions, but when they hit the ground at a smaller angle the paint is supposed to splatter mostly in the direction of the parent particle. all i really need is the divergence parameter of the collision spawn to be controlled by the angle of impact :) can anyone think of something?

Hi, I am currently trying to render a large number of particles that have objects placed in their shape channel. The process is pretty memory intensive and I can only render about 6000 particles before max runs into memory issues. Because of the slow ramping load up times, I am trying to use the cache operator, process all of the information and save the cache with the max file. However, if I try to use the cache operator and render my scene with that many particles, I get a std::bad_alloc error and max crashes out. Any idea why this is happening? Nelson

Just a general comment... When I upgraded from 1G to 2G, I noticed a pretty good improvement in PF perfformance, and I just swapped out a GeForce Ti 64M with a NVidia Quadro 4 900 GXL (which is a fairly old card)...and now I am able to fragment birth scripts with 10,000 faces. Ironic, but the Max Core has a real issue with even having 10,000 mesh objects in its database, whilst Particle Flow does not...it took two hours to break up a 125 segment sphere into 7,750 separate objects, and only minutes in Particle Flow to design with them!!! So, yes, Ram matters, and yes, video card absolutley matters...

I don't know if it's my thinking but I don't get how to utilize the particles. I'm aware of using a facing 2d plane with a map utilizing opacity but this seems limiting (very limiting.) What I never see discussed is what to do when you have the particles doing what you want. For me it's a gaping hole in the process as I never see it discussed. Is it so easy that nobody bothers to mention it? What are some of the ways to utilize the particles so that you have visible objects in the viewport. I often imagine particles equaling dust. And that I can assign stuff to the dust but I can never figure out how to do it for: Sand, rain, dust, birds, that floating bag from 'American Beauty' lol, a illuminated spiral of plasma or whatever else have you. I do know about having a group of splines that act as seperate objects during an explosion or such but that's of little help in any thing but explosions. So what are the different ways of making use of the particles?

I was reading the post you had about random numbers in the scripts section and was wondering if the following was true (i am away from max right now, so bear with me) you set up a default flow render 100% view 100 % display etc,etc ----- birth 0-30 amount 200 no deviation speed =300 (along icon) no deviation position icon shape tetra display ticks and you add... age test for 30 frames deviation 10 frames seed 12345 delete by age test 30 frames deviation 10 frames seed 12345 the question is, does this mean that because the seeds are the same the age test on frame (n) might be 20, and the the delete test age would be 20, because the random seeds are the same? :?

Hi Oleg, Here's a problem that I have encountered. Emitter moves fast on a Helix path, and spreads particles along the way. However the line created by particles is not smooth. Setting the parameter 'Integration Step" in PF Source to a single tick doesn't make any difference. Is it possible to correct this problem? [url=http://www.orbaz.com/forumData/scenes/20050210/test.zip]Here[/url] is the 3dsmax7 file ([url=http://www.orbaz.com/forumData/scenes/20050210/test.zip]test.zip[/url] 25KB). Best Regards, Alexander (aka Viper)

The first Problem i've reached while trying to blow up my object using p flow was that i cant simply do this ^) i have no instruments to rebirth new particles along my object's surface the way like it is made by particle studio plugin. in P_studio i can replace whole object by it's particle-made copy with material and mapping within. then i blow part of my object using vector influence , i make it in two events : in first event particles birth , and in second one they blow. After this operations i can bind any type of space warps to my P_studio icon. BUT!! i can't bind any space warps exactly to that event which i need the space warp to affect . for example, after binding gravity to whole particle system i have gravity fieled affecting ALL my particles. it's isnt the result i wanna to get ^( in pflow there is a lot of cool an flexible instruments to affect the particles with numerous fields in different events separately from each other. but i have no instruments to get the particle-made copy of my object the way that it is made by p_studio/ help me! maybe ther are other ways to get the result. i'm wery intersted in getting the rusult exactly in p flow . THANKZ FOR help

Is there any way to make 'point clusters' using PFlow? I'm trying to fake my way through a fluid simulation and it need my particles to emit or be thrown in clumps and I can't quite figure out how to do it. ...is this possible? Thought about using the blobmesh thing but it has it's restrictions on what you can and can't do with it. thanks

I read a [url=http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=182858]question[/url] at the CGTalk board and thought about a way to implement it. The question is about the ability to assign random colors to new particles. The most efficient way would be to use the Mapping operator. Unfortunately, as of the moment Mapping operator has a bug that doesn't allow mapping values to propagate to the next events. Nevertheless, I created the scene and put the Mapping operator where it should be. To overcome the bug, I used a Script operator in the next event. So, basically a Mapping operator assigns different mapping values to new particles. A float noise controller assigns the same value to particles if they enter the event at the same time. Then I used a gradient texture with different colors. The result: particles spawn from the same parent have the same color but each batch has a different color. The example scene to download is [url=http://www.orbaz.com/forumData/scenes/20041031/DifColorsThruMapping.zip]here[/url] (24.7KB) Thanks, Oleg B.

Hi Oleg, I am developing a PFlow Operator with the SDK and have hit some walls. First, I remember there was a dedicated PFlow SDK Help file when PFlow was still an extension to 5.1. I cannot find it anymore and feel it would be good to have. Second, I cannot figure out how to enable a MAXScript Vector Channel from my code. Basically, the C++ equivalent of the scripted handler on ChannelsUsed pCont do ( pCont.useVector = true ) If I place a Script Operator with the above code before my operator, I can access and write to the channel using chMXSVector = GetParticleChannelMXSVectorWInterface(pCont); ... chMXSVector->SetValue(particleIndex, position); but I want to ENABLE the channel explicitly in my operator if possible. The reason I am doing this is to write my calculated particle positions into the Vector Channel to be used by a Find Target Operator set to "By Script Vector" Hope you can help (I know you can! :D ) Cheers, Bobo