The Advanced Data Manipulation toolset for Particle Flow allows you to produce your own Particle Flow operators by creating data presets. Each operator/preset is stored as a separate file with the extension PFP (Particle Flow Preset). You can designate a network folder to keep the presets, and artists in a studio can create and exchange their presets without needing to restart 3ds Max.
3ds Max comes with several presets to get you started. To see how a preset works, load it into a Data operator or test and check out the data flow in Data View.
Some of the presets show up in the Particle View depot as regular operators: BlurWind, Random Walk, and Spin Limit. These are also available via the Load Preset function in the Data actions.
Other presets—Delete By Elevation, Particle Per Vertex, Reduce Cached Lifespan, Suction Hole, SurfaceSpread, and TubeFollow—are available via both the Data Preset operator and test and the Load Preset function in the Data actions.
Interface
This section provides information about the Data Preset operator and test, as well as specifics about the included presets.
- Data Preset
- The Particle View depot contains two Data Preset actions: an operator and a test, included in the operators group and tests group respectively. When you drag either into the event display, a dialog listing available presets opens. Double-click the desired preset or click it once and then click OK. The preset is then available for editing in Particle View like any other operator or test.
- BlurWind
- Controls particle speed to simulate wind force. You can also apply a viscosity effect and specify whether the speed and viscosity are affected by particle size.
BlurWind does not suffer from the shortcoming of the standard Wind space warp, where a particle is accelerated indefinitely and using additional Drag space warps is necessary to fix it.
- Random Walk
- Creates chaotic, turbulent particle motion. As with BlurWind, you can add viscosity and use particle size as a control factor.
- Spin Limit
- Lets you control spinning of particles by defining minimum and maximum spin rates. You can animate the maximum spin rate parameter to slow down the spinning effect.
- Delete By Elevation
- Deletes particles if they go above or below the specified height. If you have particles that might leak through collision surfaces, you can use this operator to save CPU cycles on those lost particles.
- Particle Per Vertex
- Spawns particles to match the number of vertices in a reference geometry object, and places the particles at the reference object's vertices. The operator should be preceded by Birth operator that creates a single particle as a seed for spawning. This way you can match each vertex of the object with a particle without needing to set the number of particles in the Birth operator and using the Position Object operator; everything is done automatically for you. If you increase segmentation of the reference object, Particle Per Vertex adjusts automatically.
- Suction Hole
- Functions as a force space warp by attracting particles from an icon-defined half-space and sending them through a circle icon outward as a stream.
- Reduce Cached Lifespan
- Decreases particle lifespan as defined by the Reduce By parameter. It can be used only as a Post-Cache operator with the Cache Disk or Cache Selective operator. Cache operators should have the Delete operator to define the original lifespan.
This operator serves as an example of the Advanced Data Manipulation toolset's ability to pre-calculate and store the motion of particles and then work on coloring and materials properties that can be dependent on particle lifespan.
- SurfaceSpread
- Spawns particles on a geometry surface with options for the spread pattern.
- TubeFollow
- Simulates the hydrodynamics effect of a water stream in a tube with a variable cross-section. The Tube Geometry button defines the reference geometry to be used as a tube. The Speed parameter defines the particle speed at the moment of particle generation, at which time the operator calculates the current cross-section size. This is later used to compare the current cross-section and thus to speed a particle up or slow it down. The Min Height and Max Height parameters define the minimum and maximum altitudes of the tube geometry.