Dries Posted January 12, 2004 Share Posted January 12, 2004 Hi, I'm doing an attempt to render a particle stream of water (who isn't doing fluids these days?) with metaballs and I need some optimization help. I have generated gzipped .bgeo files for every frame up to say 10MB. They only contain point information. The idea was to use a "Render from file" to reduce .ifd size, but I can't get "point instance" to work in this case. Is this normal behaviour? I'm currently trying to copy the metaballs to the points and generate .bgeo's like that and then use "Render from file" but cooking time is extreme and my .bgeo's will go through the roof. Before anything, I would like to visualize them just as spheres and I thought of the way you can render particle sysems "as spheres" but I tried to mimic the attributes that a particle system generates (pstate seems to be the only significat one?) but that didn't seem to work either. Surely, somebody has tried this before... Thanks DRie.s Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
old school Posted January 12, 2004 Share Posted January 12, 2004 Point instancing will not work. The metaballs won't interact as they are treated as discrete individual entities. You will have to send the metaballs as is to mantra. Why not just save the geo file out as metaballs? You will have the weight attributes applied. Shouldn't be too heavy. In H6.1, you can try out the procedural render dso for mantra to polygonize metaballs at render time. Object>Render Folder Geometry: Procedural Mantra Procedure: + > choose Polygonized Metaballs The native rendering of metaballs in Mantra is improved in H6.1. Try that first. Before anything, I would like to visualize them just as spheres and I thought of the way you can render particle sysems "as spheres" but I tried to mimic the attributes that a particle system generates (pstate seems to be the only significat one?) but that didn't seem to work either. Convert Meta SOP to polygonize your metaballs for previs purposes. It is fast and accurate. The problem with using spheres is supporting all the different kernel functions and having a sphere that is the approximate size of the metaball. Sure you can generalize a solution, but it won't be too accurate, especially if you start randomizing the Weight and X, Y, and Z attributes with the different Kernel functions. Very tough. Metaballs have pros and cons as far as the look vs. expense goes. They're great for morphing objects and doing effects like pouring water, dripping water, running water on surfaces, etc. They fall flat (pardon the pun) for water surfaces like a flowing creek. A fluid simulator affecting a surface is quite common these days. Metaballs will fight you trying to simulate a flat flowing water surface. The metaballs have to be too small and you need too many of them to create this effect. Now using metaballs to push a water surface around would make an interesting approach using bulge or magnet SOPs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dries Posted January 12, 2004 Author Share Posted January 12, 2004 Thanks for your reply. I used metaconvert and saved the bgeo's like that, which helped, but as you mentioned, it looks as I need far more particles to make a substance. And even at low quality, the metaconvert is quite expensive. I'm going to look at your "procedural" approach but I'm going to consider your surface transform option as well. Cheers. DRie.s Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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